Spheres of Influence
by Alexandra Spar
Summary: What happens when the cosmic balance between Heaven and Hell is disturbed? Who's second-in-command of the infernal realm, and why can't Gabriel answer his own phone?


This is an old, old story. I'm only putting it up here because I'm curious to see if anyone actually reads this part of ff.net. And because I'm sick of writing disclaimers. Nevertheless, I've got to point out that this story has strong parallels to bits of "Good Omens," with which I am not affiliated. I also have nothing to do with Milton, or Hugo. Or Neil Gaiman. Sigh...

Hello.

Just to warn you; whatever preconceptions you may have about the vampire Tamar, this story will probably not live up to them. Her life, all several centuries of it, was never as sordid, interesting or criminal as it has been made out to be by the mudslingers who now run the world. What's left of it.

The vampire never deserved her epithets: Infernal Seductress, Mistress of Hell, Demonic Dominatrix. She was what she was: beautiful, and powerful, and for the most part without regret; but she was never what you'd classify as evil. It is so easy to blame her, and her associates, for that August; but this story tells the real story, the account of those angels of God and those men of the world who so comprehensively fucked it all over in the late summer of 2003. You won't like it, if you're looking for sensation.

As urban myth, it sucks.

As revealed truth, and personal narration, it's...interesting.

But before we blame Tamar, before we curse her name, we must know her, understand her, view the story from both sides. Her tale is only one thread in a tapestry of pain.

The vampire is alone now. Imagine her alone. Imagine her in the darkness, cold and smelling of dust; imagine what she sacrificed. Read the story or leave it; you'll gain about the same amount of knowledge. You won't care.

Turn the lights off, sit in the blackness of the now-poisonous atmosphere, listen to the hiss of your oxygen apparatus. What was it like before that day in August? What would it have been to be able to breathe unaided, to walk under the brilliance of a blue summer sky without protection?

Read, and learn why the world became the way it was that day.

Hi.

I'm Tamar. I go to art school.

Sometimes.

The rest of the time I spend bumming around London wearing as little as I can get away with....

This city has its own dark side, like the cold smell of wet stone under Paris's bridges and the blank black shapes of the Conciergerie; the Traitor's Gate and the dens of Rotherhithe serve much the same purpose in that they create an air of old sorrow, old crimes hidden beneath dark waters....It is an unhealthy place. I like unhealthy things.

My flatmate likes things to creak and be covered in dust. He reads decorating magazines and makes impassioned speeches about ambience and coordinating drapes. He also sleeps in a coffin.

Personally I think he overdoes it a bit, but he is charming and insincere and yellow-haired and beautiful, and I can forgive him a little pretension on those strengths. He's an actor; he's entitled to be insufferable. Tonight....I think I should be extra-special quiet. I really don't feel like having to listen to him complain about everything; I can creep up these stairs as mist, though it always makes me feel old and damp and strange; I can avoid him, if I am careful. I shiver, and dissolve.

It's hard to keep oneself cohesive in this vaporous state; one tends to lose the sense that one is whole and complete. Bits of me keep wanting to detach and drift off on their own; but I reach the stairhead intact, and pour my being into my favorite shape, solidifying gently. He was there, off-white, sitting at the great black table, head in hands. I crept past the door, but heard him call my name. Crap. I returned, came in, set a thermos flask on the black glass surface. "I feel terrible," he informed me, looking up at me through long eyelashes.

"I'm not surprised," I said. "Last night's midnight snack must have had a B.A.C. close to saturation. I've brought you dinner, but I take it you're not interested. A lawyer. Very juicy." I indicated the flask, and his face went whiter, if that were possible.

"Blood, Tamar. Blood and life....I knew a Jehovah's Witness once, Tamar; they believe that blood is sacred, not to be made impure, a force in itself...."

I thought of Renfield in his cell, catching flies and gibbering. The blood is the life, the blood is the life..."Pretend it's wine, then," I suggested, annoyed, and he looked at me with those great eyes.

"Alcoholic beverages?"

"Pretend it's fucking Kool-Ade, Alex," I snapped, "only drink it. I don't feel like dealing with a starving vampire as well as a hung-over one."

He regarded me, his lovely face expressing pain, sorrow, hurt, injustice. I melted, coming around the great table to put my hands on his shoulders and hold him. "I'm sorry," I murmured. "You're so rarely moralistic."

"Only when I feel sick," he said, covering my hand with his. We remained like that for a space of some minutes; eventually I came back to myself.

"I'm going to bed," I said. "It's nearly morning. You might consider doing the same," and kissed him on the top of his flaxen head.

Coffins are not necessary. Bram was wrong about that, as with so many other things. I suppose one should give him credit for trying. My bed is a four-poster affair hung in green silk and cream chiffon, and the windows have very heavy green brocaded curtains. One's country's earth is not necessary either, but some of us affect it, along with the cloak and the strange and geographically unplaceable accent. Personally, I feel they're annoyingly snobbish, but then I am a liberated dracula, and the only accent I speak with is a faint tang of Cockney.

I peeled off my leather jeans, pulled off my boots, and unhooked my matching leather bra; thus denuded, I slipped into bed and pulled the covers over my head, sinking down into the vampire sleep, dreamless and deep and without knowledge of time's passing. One may sleep like that for centuries until the waking world calls again.

But this time there were dreams. My sister, whose hair was as scarlet as my own, several shades lighter and straight as a waterfall; my sister Archaea called Jall, who became a vampire the same night as I did, and made me come too into the world of shadows, who fought with me for control of our destiny back in the hot lands of Alexander, many hundred years ago, who envied me the favor of the King before ever he married Roxane. My sister, whose sweet body is corrupted now by her own lifestyle, who is the lead singer for a band known as Vivisepulture, a morphine, heroin, cocaine, amphetamine user, and who hates me with the hate only a vampire can muster: a hate that lasts many hundred lifetimes, with the bitterness of those who cannot die. I dreamed of her, made of the sun it seemed beneath the vault of heaven, wearing white, with her blood-red hair streaming over her shoulders, saying "If I must needs live forever, why should my little sister have the benefit of death? Let her become immortal as I am, let her body change and become white and thin and inhuman, let her eyes know the pain of centuries, as mine must. She shall not have what I may not."

Oh, Archaea, were you so envious of me that you gave me that great gift?

I woke in the early dusk, cold and weary with dreams. Alexander lay beside me in the great bed, having abandoned his lonely satin-lined coffin for the comfort and warmth of my silken sheets. At peace in the depths of vampire sleep, his face seemed so young, so untouched by the centuries, that he almost seemed human, ephemeral and roseate. I drank in his beauty, the dark-gold hair slipping down the pillows like rain, the great blue eyes closed, their lashes lying in perfect half-moons on the alabaster of his skin. He was rose and gold compared to my snow-white skin; he must have drunk the blood I brought him, to have thus color in his complexion. I loved him so much then that I could feel it as physical pain, a hot little ball beneath the tip of my breastbone. And he was mine....

I kissed him lightly and rose, closing the bedcurtains behind me. He could sleep as long as he desired; I hunted far more effectively than he did any day, and I provided him with what he needed. I put on a black satin skirt, a black corset, stilettos, evening gloves, and combed out my long dark red hair, so dark it seemed black except where the light touched it, and woke the scarlet sparks within its depths. I slipped out of the room and made my way down the creaking stairs as quietly as I could, and out into the new night. 

I didn't understand my dreams, or why they had come, when I never dream; but I knew someone who might. In the red-light districts of London, one name was known in every dive that advertised live dancers, one name was plastered here and there on marquees, one image was sketched by would-be graffiti artists on convenient walls. The name changed, but the goddess stayed the same: Ishtar, or Inanna, or Astarte.

I came to a club known as the Miramar Lounge, where she was advertised tonight, and slipped past the bouncer with practiced ease. She was on stage, and I watched transfixed; the same goddess whose beauty and sensual power had stirred the Babylonians to build the great blue Ishtar Gate in homage to her, create massive heaps of theological brick to her glory and credit her with the fertility of their fields was dancing with air in a way which made me desire her strongly, stronger than I thought I could desire. I was light-headed, and it was with difficulty that I followed her when she went backstage to her dressing room.

"Tamar! Hey, sugar, how's life treating you?"

"Fine, I suppose," I said. "Don't tell me you have to do this. You're a goddess. Why the hell are you dancing for tips in such a hole?"

"Because it's fun," she told me, unzipping various things. "Why do you attend London College of Art?"

"Touche," I said. "Listen, I got a question to ask you."

"Fire away," she said, frowning at herself in a mirror and tugging at her mighty breasts, imprisoned in black latex.

"Did anything happen last night? Anything which might bring me dreams of my sister, and make the world feel strange?"

"You are perceptive, child," she said slowly, apparently satisfied with her appearance. "Yes. Something's disrupted the balance of Heaven and Hell, or whatever you want to call them; the scales are tipped towards Heaven Inc in the great war of corporate karma. We don't know why, not yet, only we're all hoping it'll return to equilibrium soon. Much as their people want it, this world cannot survive with one of them superior: there must be competition, or things fall apart. You might want to talk to one of the neutral agents; maybe they're involved in some way. Either that, or it's a ploy by Heaven Inc. I don't know."

"Hell," I said. "I hope those annoyingly wholesome angels know that this will destroy their interests, if it's not stopped. I'll try and find out more."

"You do that, honey," she told me. "I gotta go on. Give my regards to your live-in lover, would you? That's quite a catch you have."

"I know," I said, unable to repress a smile. "Thank you, Ishtar."

"No problem," she said, and was gone, resplendent in red and black.

I hate angels. They eat high-fiber meals, exercise regularly, floss their teeth, buy only products which are environmentally and ethically sound, and demonstrate peacefully against abortion. They also wear unbelievably expensive French clothing which looks simple, elegant and understated, and they drive BMWs or Mercedes sedans. Demons, on the other hand, eat junk food, drink and smoke to excess, drive cute cars like vintage Bentleys or sexy cars like Corvette Stingrays, wear Hollywood-producer chic in black and grey, listen to music, have plentiful and casual sex, regard the world with a cynical slant, and are pathologically lazy. At least, that describes those whom I have had the pleasure of knowing.

You can't really label all demons as necessarily evil. Some of them merely do their job; some of them take pride in it, and some of them do their level best to make human lives as miserable as is physically possible. Similarly, some angels are remarkably nonpartisan, like Azrael, angel of death, while Gabriel for instance is the most anal-retentive little prig you'll find this side of Eden. I have no truck with angels, normally: we disapprove of each other.

I returned to the flat, having waylaid a young secretary-type with big hair. Alexander was watching TV with a melancholy air. He perked up when I arrived.

"Hey, baby," he said in what I assume he meant to be an American drawl. "What's shaking?"

"The foundations of theological reality, apparently," I said, offering him what looked like a bottle of finest Beaujolais. "Ishtar says Heaven's just slid up a notch or two. That's why there's nothing particularly interesting on TV." I pointed to the porcelain-faced queen on whatever news channel he was watching: she was riffling through her papers with an air of slightly frantic boredom.

"And still to come on the Late News, er, several anonymous donations of canned food have been given to local charities....Ron Becker joins us live from St James' Park where there seems to be a strange nocturnal flurry of persons picking up litter and placing it in proper receptacles....er....Ah, yes, and we have a report of a car accident on the M1....oh, excuse me, it was not an accident, but a small traffic jam resulting from several Good Samaritans aiding a motorist in distress..." Alexander flicked the TV channel to something less pathetic.

"See? Dramatic reduction in petty crime, vandalism, etc."

"This isn't another angel thing, is it?" he inquired, stretching over most of the couch, like a cat. "I really dislike those little prats."

"I hope not, because if it is, they're likely to be around soon checking up on their work. I don't know if they're aware that it's as negative an influence on them as it is on their unholy counterparts; you know, they can't exist unless there's balance. Cosmic osmosis, and that."

"Who?"

"Never mind. Is there anything worthwhile on telly? I don't actually see how we can alter the course of this particular transient tonight, and I'm in the mood for self-indulgent sloth."

He flipped channels with artistic abandon. "Would Knight Rider do you?" he inquired. I pulled off my stiletto heels and slithered over the couch's high back, landing mostly beside him. "I'll take that as a yes," he said, nibbling on my ear, and we settled back to watch the familiar sleek black shape of Kitt making tracks over the New World.

***************************************

Haliel was waiting nervously outside his superior's door. One did not normally knock on that door; one was expected to be there when summoned. He had not made an appointment, and he was not exactly pleased to be there in the first place; nevertheless, he breathed deeply of the rarefied atmosphere of Heaven Inc., and knocked delicately on the pale pink Formica surface.

"Yes?" Gabriel's beautiful light tenor inquired.

Haliel entered, diffidently, his wings quivering. "My lord...?"

"What is it, Haliel?"

"Er, there's been some kind of shift in the force balances, sir. In our favor, of course."

"I know," said Gabriel, one pale eyebrow raised. "What of it?"

"Er, don't you think there ought to be some sort of investigation into the causes, sir? I mean, we don't know where it came from, how far it will continue, and if it will reverse. It seems to me that it might be dangerous. Er."

Gabriel did not immediately respond. His fingernails, which were immaculately clean and very short, tapped out a little rhythm on the base of his green banker's lamp. Haliel recognized it: HA-llelujah, HA-llelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, ha-LAY-lu-JAH.

"Haliel, there are certain values I am not sure you have completely internalized. You are, after all, a very junior member of the seraphim." HA-llelujah, went the fingernails. "It seems you are in need of further instruction. When I said that I was to be disturbed only for reasons of great significance, I may perhaps not have made myself clear." HA-llelujah. "When something goes in our favor, Haliel, we do not question it. That is tantamount to questioning the Mysterious Ways. You do respect the ineffability of the Mysterious Ways, don't you, Haliel?"

"Er, yes, of course, sir." Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

"In that case, you can understand why the cause of this change is unquestionably Good, since the change is in our favor, yes?"

Haliel could think of several different answers to that one, mostly involving philosophical logic. He refrained from pointing out that the change was not necessarily either caused by a force of good or completely favorable to Heaven Inc. "Er, yes, sir. Excuse my mistake, sir."

"Then, Haliel, you understand why it is out of the question to attempt investigation of this change? Faith achieves all ends. I am sure you will understand more fully after several more hours studying His Word. Perhaps you had better remove yourself to the library, Haliel. Your mind seems to need putting at rest." Ha-LAY-lu-JAH.

He closed the door behind him, allowed himself a minute of pure annoyance at bureaucratic fundamentalism, and slid his features back into their normal beatific expression. To the library, then, and another stiff-necked afternoon. He was almost shocked at his own faithless sentiments, and decided that Gabriel must be right: he was confused. He shook his platinum curls and hurried away.

***********************************************************************

Lilith tapped one spike heel in exasperation. The atmosphere of the Pandemonium bar was getting to her: it had been several centuries since she'd been in here, and the clientele had not improved. The Lord of Hell was sitting slumped on a bar stool, head buried in his arms, in the grip of what looked like a magnificent hangover-in-progress.

Death, catching her furious glance, shrugged. Lucifer was often like this these days; he, Azrael, had attempted to reason with him several times, gaining only a literally burning glare for his trouble. Lilith put her lovely elbows on the bar next to Lucifer, picked the glass out of his limp fingers, and tasted the dregs.

"You've been giving him Canton Red, Phil, you piece of shit. I gave you credit for more sense than that....How many has he had?"

"Couldn't say, miss," the barman said levelly. "My Lord has been here for several hours."

"Yeah, well, I suppose it's difficult to refuse him credit. What's his tab come to?"

The total was eyebrow-raising, even in Pandemonium, a city known for its ineffably high inflation. She flipped several diamond disks onto the counter and shook her Master ungently.

"Wake up, sugar. Hey Azrael, stop staring and help me with him, would you?"

Together, Death and Lilith managed to drag Lucifer off the bar stool and carry him out of the establishment into the hazy red street. She felt the fast feverish pulse in his throat, frowned.

"You're stronger than me; could you carry him to my place?"

Azrael sighed and became the black-robed figure familiar to devotees of medieval woodcuts. "You owe me, temptress," he said, gathering the dead-drunk Prince of Lies into his skeletal arms.

"And you owe me one from way back in Troy. Call it even. I'll try and open a wormhole, but there's so much background crap in this area we might end up in Timbuctoo if we're not careful. Now hush and let me concentrate." Her violet eyes narrowed and suddenly blanked out, becoming flat red jewels, and then closed entirely. She spread a hand out to its full finger-spread width and pointed at the air close to them; slowly, with a lot of swirling, a round red hole opened, through which could be seen dimly the outlines of Lilith's palatial bedroom. "Go!"

Black and white flickered around them like the edges of stock-film that's beginning to stick in the projector and burn, and suddenly they were there within the hazy red room, and that haze was clearing.

"Thanks. I wasn't sure I could hold that open and carry him myself," Lilith said, gesturing towards the king-sized waterbed. "Just put him down there. I'll deal with him. You want coffee, or anything?"

"No, that's okay," Death said. "You sure you're okay with him? It doesn't look exactly like his normal hedonistic complaint."

"Certain. I called for you because I didn't particularly relish the thought of going into that bar alone; I have experience with him in this state, though. Thank you for your help."

Death nodded, vanished with the sudden inrush of air that accompanied the disappearance of a physical body. She was left with the limp form of Lucifer lying on her bed, and the desire to smack him silly and tell him to be more responsible.

Several hours later, he was sitting at her table wrapped in a blanket, shivering, coughing, hands clasped around a mug of extremely strong black coffee. He looked like hell, she thought, before remembering exactly where they were. She had spent too much time in Hollywood lately.

At least his weakness was simply alcohol: she had had to jam adrenaline-filled needles into several heroin users' ribcages after particularly riotous parties, and hadn't enjoyed it. His dark-gold hair, damp and draggled, hung into his eyes, which were dilated and sunk into violet pools; his blank beautiful face was grey and sweating, his entire frame racked with shivering. She had seen him badly hung-over before, but never this badly, and she was almost worried despite her annoyance.

"How long were you there, Sam?" she asked gently. He looked at her with eyes unlike anyone else's in the three prime planes: eyes that were seraphic bright blue, but with pupils burning with coruscating white fire. Right now those burning pupils were dilated to the point where the blue was hardly visible.

"I'm not sure," he croaked. "Lilith, I feel truly dreadful."

She melted, which she hadn't known she was still able to do. He had been her first love, of course, but there had been so many others, and she was not sure how much of her personal vulnerability was left. She put her arms around him and let his head rest on her shoulder, feeling the spasms of shivering that ran through him.

They clung together for a long time. Eventually she let him go, bustling around her kitchen, keeping busy. The newspaper for that day lay on the table, and she heard him riffling through it, coughing.

"So that's what I felt," he said after a while. "'Cosmic Balance Shifts in Favor of Heaven Inc.' I thought it was just a bad dream...."

"Is that what made you nip down to Pandemonium and get plastered?" she inquired, leaning on the counter. He looked up.

"More or less. Didn't you feel it?"

"I felt something," she said. "It's not the angels, is it?"

"I don't think so. They'd have made some kind of statement, you know, 'Ha ha, we're winning', that sort of thing. Unpleasantly smug." He coughed again, painfully. "I don't think they know what's going on any more than we do."

"But, being angels, they want to think it's part of their Great Plan. Who knows, maybe it is," Lilith said, rolling purple eyes. "Stupid Plan. If He wanted Heaven to succeed, why didn't He just say what He planned to do instead of leaving it to those whelk-brained administrators?--Sam? Are you all right?"

"No," he said emphatically, pressing his fingers to his face, swaying. "Lilith...I..."

And he crumpled, with the grace only inhuman beings can muster in such circumstances, from his chair, and lay looking awfully small on her kitchen floor, curled up, pale, his great wings folded over him like those of a dying bird.

"Men," said Lilith with a mixture of annoyance and concern. "Oh, shit."

And with that pronouncement, she knelt by the fallen Lord of Hell and started to cry, something she hadn't done for at least five hundred years. They found them like that: her bent over the pale form of her Master, sobbing as though her unholy heart was flesh, and could break.

Death had been right: this was not Samael's normal hangover. He had returned, with Faust, Ozymandias, and Milton. Together they got him into bed, and Faust made doctorly noises and frowned and finally came up with the verdict that he would be all right if he could have a long period of uninterrupted rest....and if the balance between Heaven and Hell was shifted back to where it ought to be.

Milton was busily taking notes. As Samael's official biographer he was authorized to be present, but both Lilith and Ozymandias were looking at him with less than friendly stares.

"Doctor," Lilith said, "you're saying he won't recover until the balance is shifted back? Is there anything we can do for him in the meantime?"

"I believe his well-being is directly linked to the well-being of Hell, which works both ways," Faust said, pushing his glasses back up his nose. "That is, when Hell is returned to its normal eminence, he will recover. You will have noticed that on other occasions when he is indisposed the rest of Hell suffers too: this is the reverse. Until we can find out what happened, and fix it, I suggest we try and keep him as quiet as possible. Absolute rest; no underdemons bursting in to inquire about which uniform is preferable for Friday afternoon torturings. Mephistopheles can rule in his absence, I suggest: or you, Ozymandias. Lilith, do you know a competent nurse?"

"Two," she said. "Me, and Millius. Sappho might help too if she's not off on some project."

"Very well. I take it from your expression that the burden of command is not one you relish the idea of bearing, Ozymandias?"

"Yeah," said that king shortly. "I tried that. It didn't work. I'm an administrator, not a ruler."

"Fine," Faust said. "Mephistopheles it is then. He won't be thrilled either, but he's done it before. And I suggest that we keep this as low-key as possible. The seething masses don't need to know more than that our Master is temporarily indisposed and that the Lord Mephistopheles is in temporary command. If that."

Lilith nodded, moved to the phone.

******************************

Ring

Ring

Ring

Ring

Ring

"What," said Millius's low voice, clearly not in the best of moods.

"Hey, Millius," Lilith said gamely, "sorry to bother you, and that, but we've got a problem on our hands. It's Lucifer."

"Again? Hold on," Millius said, and Lilith could hear her talking to someone else in the room. She caught the title Oneiromancer, and winced. Millius had been desperately in love with the Lord of Dreams for as long as she had known her, and it sounded like there was something else going on right now in her life. "-Sorry. What sort of problem, Lilith? Is he abdicating again?"

"No, not exactly," Lilith said. "He's not well. Something to do with the imbalance between Good and Evil. We need someone to help take care of him for a while."

"Huh. Am I to take it that this is at least partly self-precipitated?"

"Yes," Lilith admitted, "he went and got monumentally smashed on Canton Red, which didn't help. Are you doing something else? I mean, I don't mean to disturb you..."

"Nothing that can't wait a few hundred years," said Millius, devoid of expression. "I'll be there in a few minutes, Lilith. See you." The phone clicked hollowly.

Millius, reflected the temptress, was older than she; created before creation really began, to be the chronicler and witness to all of His works; the storyteller. She knew every tale ever told, which made her sort of a drag at parties, but enabled her to foretell the future to some extent. Her normal shape of manifestation was that of a slender, short woman with snowy hair cut quite short in a page-boy bob and an ageless, lovely face. She gave the impression of having seen one several times before, generally in interesting circumstances, and she spent a lot of time roaming through alternate universes taking a back seat for her favorite stories; like having your favorite movies on DVD, she said, but better; you can play a role.

Lilith came back to the small cluster of infernal officials, having changed into a silk

dressing gown and let her raven hair free from its coils and loops. "She's coming," she announced. "Y'all want anything? Coffee? Moonshine? Goat's blood?"

Milton shuddered delicately. "Lapsang Souchong tea, if you have it, madam," he

requested. Lilith thought about that hard, and there was the pop of a small tin suddenly appearing out of another dimension on one of the shelves of her cupboards. Faust, still bending over the supine Lord of Hell, shook his head, and Ozymandias requested coffee. She herself rather enjoyed the tang of aged Calvados, and returned from her kitchen with a tray that glittered with full-lead crystal and sterling silver; demons believe in doing things right.

"I'll go and break the news to Mephistopheles," Ozymandias said after a while. "I really would prefer not to get up out of this chair, though.....Is anyone else feeling sort of limp?"

"Yeah," Lilith said. "I bet you it's a refractive effect of Sam's illness. Like Faust said, you know; the lord and his domain are linked. Hell has been knocked for a loop, therefore Samael is unwell, therefore Hell is suffering, therefore Samael is too, and so on. Hmmm. That's an interesting logical chain of argument."

"It makes my head hurt, whatever it is," Ozzy said. "I suppose there's no way to break the circuit apart from correcting the original imbalance?"

"Ask the doctor," she said, nursing her glass. "Where's Millius? She should be here."

"How do you spell 'refractive'?" Milton inquired.

***************************************************************

Alexander and I went walking out the night after my talk with Ishtar, out into the mists of Tower Hill, talking with the ravens. Ravens are one-track personalities, I find: their conversations consist mainly of "Ark," which can mean "I'm hungry," "Get off my territory," "When is the Raven Master coming with his breadcrumbs," or "I'm a raven, look at me." We nicked a bottle of no-star brandy off a local wino, leaving him with several quid in place of his prize, and wandered along the Embankment in a liberal frame of mind. It is not true that vampires can only consume blood: alcohol does us no lasting harm (we don't really dehydrate), and is more effective on our metabolisms than on those of the typical human.

Alex tends to overdo it. I don't really know what we were thinking that night: it was a strange muzzy memory to me when I tried to recall where we went and what we did. My last clear memory is of pole-dancing with a streetlight close to the Water Gate and the steps that lead down to the Thames; after that it all fades into a suffusion of pale orange.

I came back to myself lying on what felt like wet sand, face down. From the timbre of the light it seemed to be several hours later; Alex lay next to me, his hair draggled, his white shirt wet, as though we had been swimming. I still don't know exactly what we did.

"Ugh," I said thoughtfully, "I think I have a hangover."

Alex didn't respond. I poked him, and he groaned, rolling over to expose a greenish countenance. "Me too," he croaked and put a hand to his face. I knew the look.

"You're not going to be ill, are you?"

"Don't think so," he said, concentrating fiercely, and I saw the sweat suddenly stand out on his brow. "Ah....yes. I am. Would you mind...going away...for ten minutes?"

I rose, with some effort, and made my way a discreet distance along the damp riverbank. I didn't feel too hot myself. We had clearly found another bottle, I deduced. Poor Alex, he's "delicate" as the euphemism goes; I should make an effort to keep him off the sauce.

Just as I was determining not to touch alcohol for a while, I heard what sounded

remarkably like a human weeping. This was not exactly a kosher place for the human female this time of night, I reflected, swivelling to find the source of the sounds. Ah. It looked like she was aware of that fact.

My night-eyes saw with infrared clarity the form of a woman, young, hardly twenty; dressed (if that was the correct word) in a black bra and panties and stilettos, her face painted heavily. The paint seemed to be rather the worse for wear, her thick mascara tracing black lines down her thin cheeks with the tears that she seemed to be unable to stop.

I'd seen too many of these. Quietly I approached, so quietly she didn't know I was there until, standing behind her, I said softly "Hello."

She jumped. "Who are you?"

"A friend," I said, making my voice as nonthreatening as possible. "Who was it?"

"Just a john," she said bitterly. "He was so rough.....I refused, he....he held me down...." She rubbed ineffectually at the ruins of her makeup. "He informed me I had AIDS, said he was going to the police to say I had attacked him, they're looking for me right now...." I had not known precisely how much misery the human voice could hold. The words came out in little rushes, like sobs, and she was powerless to hold them back.

"Cig?" I offered quietly.

"God, yes," she said, clutching at the Gitane I offered her, and the match. "Thanks.....Oh God, I don't even know you......"

"It doesn't matter," I murmured. She seemed to believe that, at least.

"You ever read Les Mis?" she asked after a few moments. The cigarette glowed comfortingly in the dank dark. I nodded. "Think Fantine. My Cosette is in the charity hospital...I can't even afford a blanket for her, and they're going to take her away......I don't know how I can save her, let alone myself...."

"You will," I said, making a decision. "Come with me, Fantine."

I saw the vestiges of hesitation in her eyes. Strange redhaired women wandering under bridges at night don't tend to inspire confidence. I reached out to her and gently touched her cheek, letting into her mind the knowledge that I could be trusted, that she would be safe with me, that everything would be all right. I saw the eyes widen, narrow. "Yeah," she said, "what are you, some kind of magical social worker?"

"Ha," I pronounced. "That's gotta be the first time I've been accused of that. No. I'm just someone who can give you what you need to get your daughter back."

She wanted to believe me, I could see. And I could also see the war in her mind: at last, "what have I got to lose" won, and she nodded. I helped her to her feet, looking at the scars on her exposed skin, the way I could count each rib in her narrow sides. I don't like the human race. It's nasty to itself on a day-to-day basis, and it never takes care of its own.

"Tamar...?" I heard Alex call.

"Over here, love," I yelled back. "--My consort. Pay no attention to him, he's just hung-over. No head for winos, has Alex. If you would like to come with us, we can give you food, clothing, money, anything you need. I have seen too many like you, Fantine. I know what it's like."

She looked at me, and I could see the glimmer of trust in her eyes. "Thank you...Tamar?"

"Tamar, yes. No last name that I know of."

Alex made his way over to us, marginally less green. "Better?" I inquired.

"Not much. Who's your friend?" he asked.

"Sarah," said the prostitute, softly. "I'm Sarah."

"She needs some help, love," I told him. "She's had one hell of a day."

"You look...freezing," he told her. "Come back with us for a drink or something."

I couldn't help it. "Alex!"

"Wha...? Oh shut up, Tamar," he told me, "I didn't mean that. Even if I felt well...."

"Never mind," I said, looking at the confusion on her face. "Come on, let's get back." It wasn't far from the Traitor's Gate to our apartment, and even in her five inch heels Sarah made good time. Alex let us in, collapsed in a chair. I told Sarah to go upstairs and find something she liked to wear. "Go to bed, love," I told Alex, playing with his hair, "you look exhausted. I'll come in and see you later."

I found her sitting on a silk ottoman in my dressing room, wearing a charcoal-grey chiffon robe I had bought in a flurry of romanticism in Paris years before: it always looked like a winding sheet on me, but it seemed designed for her. Her black hair, hacked short, managed to look artistically styled; she had taken the time to wash off the remnants of her makeup, and I could see how young she really was. For a moment I envied her her bone structure: she was beautiful, well-designed, her face made of alabaster, smooth and pale and delicately chiselled. If I had made that face, I thought, I should be well pleased with the work of my hands.

Then I began to wonder exactly how such a lovely child had come to this: what had been her downfall, what had led her down the garden path to hell. I imagined the typical chain of mistakes, the child, the need for ready money, the shrieking of the parents and the slamming door, the future disappearing amid washes of cheap beer and the sound of money changing hands. I really don't like the human race. I really, really don't like it.

"This is beautiful," she said softly, fingering the ruffles.

"Keep it," I said. "Looks better on you than it ever did on me....."

"Tamar," she said. "This is like a dream. I have to know: what's the price? What do you want in return?"

"To see one less victim," I said. "Yeah, I know what it sounds like. But please believe me when I say I only want to help someone who has been denied help by every other place they could possibly turn. I am....outside of normal society. I've been where you are, and I only got out of it because somebody helped me. I want to pass on that favor."

She was having difficulty taking it all in. "What.....are you?" she asked, at last. I sighed.

"You really want to know?"

"Really."

"Okay. Alex and I are vampires."

Stunned silence. "Vampires."

"Yes. I can show you the teeth and the inhuman strength if you like, but they're not

important."

"That's okay," she said. "Vampires. Oh my God...."

"What I am is less important than what I can give you. How much do you need to get your daughter back?

"They're asking that I have sustainable income of twenty thousand a year," she said, shaking her head. "Her treatment costs something like five hundred, but she's getting better....I can't ask you to do that. No. I--"

I was counting bills. Two, four, six hundred. "Here. We'll discuss the rest later, Sarah. Do you have somewhere to sleep?"

"I can't take this," she said. "I can give you nothing. I don't want to owe anyone anything," and she replaced the bills in my fingers. "Please."

"You owe me nothing," I told her, staring out the window.

"It's not just the money. I can't be a mother to her.....I'm dying. Five years if I'm really lucky, and then she goes back to the child welfare."

"You're sure you have AIDS?" I asked, still staring at the street.

"He showed me the sarcoma." Her voice was dead.

I thought for a long time before saying what I had on my mind. "There.....might be a way."

************************************************************

Millius was lying in an overstuffed chair in a room she hadn't seen for centuries: last time, the walls had not been I.M. Pei glass and steel, but Chilmark grey granite, and the bed had been canopied in hand-embroidered red silk. Lilith's apartments had not been a proper sickroom for the Lord of Hell, and they had moved him to his own great chambers in the eighth tower of Dis; the glass cathedral ceilings were darkened, the grey glass floors covered with velvet to dull sound. Lucifer's bed, large enough to allow for typical demonic orgies, was hung in matching grey velvets, and the chairs ranged from van der Rohe to Louis Quinze. Three enormous DVD screens filled most of one wall, and a hot tub steamed and roiled gently under a humidity shield. The Devil liked the pleasures of the flesh.

She was thinking of a different face as she gazed down at Samael's pallor; a face the color of falling snow, set with great black eyes burning with starfire, framed in raven's-feather hair. Morpheus: lovely and beloved and unforgotten, after many thousand years; the original unrequited love. She had met the Dream King very early on whilst she was still in the process of being created; Morpheus was older than even the oldest of gods, and he had had some hand in inspiring the present God to create his works. She had loved him then, before she had told the first love story of the nascent world, and she had been there to sympathize with Eve. Only Eve had been loved.

She sighed. She had spent a very great deal of time attempting to forget that love, since it had done her no good whatsoever; but love is not biddable. She had even gone to his sibling Desire and begged to be set free, and Desire had laughed at her musically and told her that she was meant to suffer this way, and she should talk to Destiny; Destiny had shrugged his massive shoulders and told her there was nothing to be done about it, it was there, in the book. "Sorry," he had said to her, there in the great grey garden; "I really wish there was something I could do about it. Maybe you were made wrong."

Maybe I was, she thought now, watching Samael's long, long eyelashes flutter and part.

"...Millius?" he whispered.

"How are you feeling, my Lord?" she said quietly. The great eyes closed again.

"Bloody awful. Millius, why are you here?"

"Lilith called me. Is there anything I can do for your Lordship?"

"You could stop calling me that. Most of the other ones I can stand, except Satan, which has been rather overused..." He trailed off, coughing. "Old Scratch' I find quite unflattering."

"Hush," she told him. "You're not to be excited. Just rest." The hangover, whatever it was, seemed to have worn off: he merely looked sick and feverish, instead of frighteningly ill. Lilith and Faust had filled her in on what had precipitated this particular attack; she, as a neutral agent, had been aware of it, but not of its unanticipated effects. She had been thinking quite hard for the past hours about what could be causing such an imbalance, and had come up with an idea, or at least an explanation. He didn't need to hear it, of course: what he needed was to be left well alone, and allowed to rest. He was a busy angel, what with all the merger meetings, business trips, personal manifestations and temptings, courtmarshallings, creations and destructions, and above all the constant effort of keeping Hell going on a daily basis; it was a physical drain on him to have to support all the theological underpinnings of the inferno with his being, like a mage supporting a particularly complicated spell. He was seldom ill, but when he was it tended to be a function of physical and mental exhaustion.

"Millius?"

"Yes, your....Samael?"

"Better," he said, managing a smile. "Who's in charge?"

"Mephistopheles," she told him. "It was him or Ozymandias, and Ozymandias got out first."

"Fine, fine," he said. "As long as Beelzebub isn't. My head is on fire...."

At least she could do something for him. She placed her cool, inhuman fingers, lacking any semblance of fingerprints, to his temples and began the process of drawing his pain into her own body. She gasped, almost cried out, suddenly shaking in the grip of his white-hot agony, not having known the force of his headaches. He reached up with hot hands and broke the contact, not letting go of her fingers, holding them in his own with sudden strength.

"No," he said softly. "I appreciate the thought, Millius, but I can't inflict this on you."

"My lord, I...I had not known," she said, still unsure of the edges of her consciousness. "Forgive me my weakness."

"Mine, not yours," he told her. "It passes on its own; it takes time, and it's unpleasant, but I know it well. I should not have let you try....

"There is one thing you can do for me, Millius. Tell me what is happening. Why did the balance shift, and when is it likely to go back to normal?"

She took a few moments to find the normal connections between her mind and her

physical body. "My lord, you need rest, I should leave you..."

"Come on. Tell me. I know you know something: I can see it in your eyes."

"If you insist," she said, "but it's only a theory. I think Heaven and Hell are on some kind of fulcrum, balanced on a point of complete neutrality: but the two ends of the seesaw are held up by some kind of metaphorical string. I think those strings were cut two nights ago, only the one supporting Hell was cut first."

"So we nose-dived. But if we're balanced perfectly...?"

"Then we should feel the opposite effect shortly, like a pendulum: Heaven will sink, and we will rise. And so on, until the whole balance restabilizes."

"But what were the strings?" he said. "Why were they cut?"

"I haven't the foggiest idea," she admitted, "unless they were there in order to prevent any shifting of the balance in the first place, and someone who didn't understand the theory of cosmic equilibrium has decided to make some trouble for both Himself and your Lor.....yourself."

********************************************************

The universe is curved, according to astrophysicists, only curved so that we don't know it's curved, through a dimension we cannot understand. Astrophysicists, however, haven't taken a field trip through said dimension to find out if they're right: they believe they are merely because if the fabric of space-time is curved, things would act the way they, in fact, do. Most of this is based on the conjecture of one Isaac Newton, who is as of the date of this chronicle whooping it up in a small bar not far distant from the one from which we last saw Lilith and Azrael emerge, laughing madly and telling anyone who will listen that he made it all up after he had this crazy dream about an apple falling on his head, only you see it wasn't an apple, it was a metaphysical construct, and less all have 'nother drink. In point of actual fact, the universe is roughly the shape of a large pseudo-Roman amphitheatre, containing a gigantic model of a seesaw, two crowns made of galaxies, and an assortment of obsolete gods who have nothing much better to do than sit around and watch the outcome of the present conflict.

One of them is climbing down from a pile of dark matter, a pair of celestial scissors in its hands.

************************************************************

Metropolitan Police Commander Leona Mendoza stared at the man sitting opposite her with badly-disguised annoyance. They had been through this particular argument at least three times in the past week: she was thoroughly sick of her subordinates behaving like preschool children with a single unshakable determination.

Christopher Riley looked at her with his burning eyes. "Sir, I just can't see that this program is going anywhere," he insisted, "it's wasting the officers' time, it's had little or no success in the Met district, and there's a lot of other issues that would benefit from more police presence."

"Riley," she said, "I don't make the rules. The Commissioner does. The Commissioner is also very strongly against petty thievery and prostitution, and he has assigned officers to patrol the red-light district and crack down on crime. Okay? I can't do anything. If you want to make a formal complaint you have to go through the proper channels and fill out forms and have them checked by the administration. Coming to me and wingeing doesn't achieve anything beyond annoying both of us. Now, is there anything relevant you wish to speak to me about?"

She could see Riley arguing with himself. He had one of those very open countenances which hid very little; he was also quite strikingly attractive, which she wished she could ignore: it made him difficult to argue with. His black hair needed cutting, falling untidily into his eyes, which were brown and black-fringed; he was not at his best today, rather pale, with circles under those great eyes. Nevertheless, the effect was quite powerful....

She frowned at herself. "Riley?"

"No, sir," he said after a moment, "nothing further to report. I'll just be going, then, shall I?"

"You're on duty tonight, Riley?" she said. "Focus on the Embankment. There's a lot of sleaze down there these days. I had a report from an officer who said a man approached him claiming to have been attacked by a prostitute."

He said nothing, merely picked up his trenchcoat from where he had slung it on the back of a chair, saluted half-heartedly, and made his exit.

Christopher Riley was thirty, quite young for a DI, and bitterly resented working under Mendoza; even further, he resented being assigned to street patrol like a new cadet. He and Mendoza had been in the same class at the Academy, had worked together on many occasions, but when they graduated close to the head of their class she had been snapped up by the affirmative action people as perfect Commander material: beautiful, clever, fast, competent, and feminine. He was relegated to officer status and had to work his way up to Detective Inspector through sheer achievement, whereas she was handed her prizes. He was not exactly a sexist: he knew as well as Mendoza that she was intelligent and able, but he resented the overcompensation of the affirmative action feminists, looking for figureheads, unconcerned with fairness.

And he was so tired. He had been working double shifts for some time, on a knotty murder case and on this moronic street beat program the Commissioner had dreamed up, like so many of his fellow policemen: the ordinary officers were swamped with the demands for police presence, and they were supplemented by the detective inspectors, as if they didn't have enough to do. He had not slept more than five hours in the last twenty-four, and he was becoming more and more convinced that his headache was going to turn into a migraine. He pulled the coat on, turned up the collar against the drizzle, and left the station, walking against the wind, down to the Embankment. The midnight was leaving the sky, and yellow dawn had begun to tinge the east.

****************************************************************

Sarah was staring at me, her great eyes wide. "No," she said, and I heard hope in her voice, somewhere, hidden under a great deal of shock. "I....no. My child....how could I raise her? How would she live?"

"I didn't say it was an optimal choice," I said gently. "But you can indeed raise her. When she is old enough to understand, you can give her the truth, and she can decide what she wants." I could see she wasn't going to make a considered decision that night, so I changed the subject. "Don't worry about it now. Do you have somewhere to sleep?"

"Yes. I....There's a safe house on Carlyn Street. If you don't mind...?"

"Not at all. Most people don't relish the thought of staying the night in a vampire's home." I saw her safely out, with the wad of bills tucked in her bra, the safest place either of us could think of. She was still in shock, I thought, biddable, easy to direct. I wondered whether I had done right, or if I had just complicated her life further than it really needed to be complicated.

"Tamar?"

I jumped. Leaning against the railing of our front steps was a dark form wrapped in something black with a turned-up collar: for a moment I thought my old friends had come to visit. Then reality returned. "Riley! Gods, you scared me."

He made his way up the steps, carefully. He seemed to be holding himself as if the air weighed on him more than it should.

"Tamar, are you harboring a whore?" Riley said bluntly, and I laughed.

"Me? Why would I do an illegal thing like that?"

"Don't play cute with me, okay?" he said tiredly, "I have to cite her. There's been a report of an attack by a prostitute in this area, and you might know something about it."

"What a nasty suspicious mind you have, Riley," I told him. "Come in."

In the light, he looked terrible. I splashed some brandy into a glass and handed it to him. "Riley, even if I knew anything about this alleged attack, I wouldn't tell you. See, what you policemen don't tend to understand is that people like this hypothetical girl are not hardened criminals most of the time: they are simply people who the world seems to use as universal scapegoats and garbage disposals. She has done nothing wrong. Her child is close to dying, and it was she who was attacked, not the other way around. There is human decency in looking the other way, Riley. She won't cause any disturbance to the fabric of society: she will not be hooking any more, nor will she ever appear again in front of one of your interrogators. She does not exist for you. Just once, Riley, imagine what it is to be a whore. Just once, turn the other way."

He drained the glass. I could watch him weakening.

"Give me your promise that she won't be turning tricks in London any time soon," he said hoarsely. I sat down opposite him and gave him the full force of my not-quite-human eyes.

"You have it," I told him. He rose unsteadily, set down the glass. I led him to the door. "And, Riley...?"

"Yes?"

"Get some sleep, would you? You remind me of some old, old friends."

Now, I thought, why was that so easy?

Millius strode meaningfully from Samael's personal chambers, having been relieved by Lilith, bearing heavy drugs; there was something afoot that she personally had to deal with. A long time since she had told this particular story, she thought. Opening a rift between parallel realities, she stepped through into the London of 1998; rainswept, cold and bitter, very real compared to the slightly heady atmosphere of the eighth tower of Dis.

Tower Bridge....no. London Bridge....no. Not a great heavy bridge with tower supports: one in pale stone, with parapets supported by carven balustrades, triple-arched; the letter N in high relief was not quite visible in this time, since it was not a bridge built to the glory of Napoleon at all, but one taking on its ghost for this one night, when spheres of history overlapped and one bridge served the same purpose as its fellow in another city entirely.

She could not see the looming towers of the Embankment apartment buildings: they seemed overshadowed by a far older building, one with conical towers and small arrowslit windows, and farther upstream there was the suggestion of twin rectangular towers and a spire; and the man she finally recognized standing on the bridge seemed to be wearing not a Burberrys trench coat but a dark blue greatcoat, and a tricorn hat....

"Fuck," she said, as she saw the man's face, pale, lifted to the heavens with blind eyes. She hastened to the bridgehead, crossed the span.

"Riley?"

He looked up, hardly able to see her through the herringbone patterns that coruscated in front of his eyes. He made out the form of a woman, wearing a long dark coat, her snowy hair falling beneath her shoulders. She spoke his name, although he did not recognize her.

"Riley," she said, and touched his shoulder: a cool, inhuman touch, sending shudders through him. "Riley, it's not time for this. This story has been told before, and there's no need for you to follow it through to the end."

"Who are you," he said. She laughed, low and rough and kind.

"No one you know, though I know every dream you've ever had. Don't do this. There's no reason for you to."

"What do you know of my reasons," he snarled. "I am corrupt. I let a whore slip through my fingers; I could have captured her, I could have brought her to justice. I am not capable of performing my duties, and without that I am nothing."

"Oh, Riley," she sighed, "you're so like him. Maybe you'll listen to me: he almost believed the truth I told him, almost, but he could not change. You're younger, Riley, you can do good."

"I can never do good," he said, leaning heavily on the parapet. "Go away, whoever you are."

"Riley....You're ill. You're not thinking straight. What Tamar convinced you to do was right, although you can't see it like that. The whore she protects will play a larger part in this game than you can understand, and it was not just Tamar's instinct which drove her to help that girl; she, like you, is under the influence of another story, many years ago. You're exhausted, Riley, you need rest. Let go of your self-loathing."

"What do you mean? I'm not ill," he said, and the very way he clung to the parapet with white knuckles betrayed him. She sighed in exasperation, and in a motion faster and more graceful than he had imagined possible put her white hands to his temples, cool hands, smooth, with tapered fingers. He heard her indrawn breath, and suddenly the flashing lights in front of his eyes dimmed, and the inexorable pounding behind his left eye, and the mounting nausea, receded into the night. He leaned bonelessly against the wet stone of the parapet, limp with the release from pain.

Millius shuddered as she drew away the migraine, grounding the pain resonances in her own bones, letting the agony take up its place in her own skull. She fought down the nausea, releasing Riley at last, letting her hands fall to her sides.

"What....have you done?"

"Nothing permanent," she told him. "Can you think clearly now?"

"Yes," he said wonderingly.

"And are you going to throw yourself melodramatically into the Thames?"

"No. No, I don't think so."

"Good. Now go home, Riley, and go to sleep." She let herself dematerialize, letting go of this reality with a welcome release from his pain.

**************************************************************

Gabriel straightened the straight blotter on his desk a few more microns, lined up his expensive gold Cross pen and pencil set, turned off the green banker's lamp. Five o'clock exactly. He believed in keeping office hours with the same determination with which he believed in the Way; it was all a part of the larger plan, of course, and there was nothing in His Word which actually stated "Thou shalt work nine to five Monday through Friday," but Gabriel felt it was Right. He felt a lot of things in capital letters. He was that sort of angel.

He rose, pushed in his leather swivel chair, and left his office. His blond secretary cast down her demure blue eyes as he passed; her fingernails were palest rose, matching her modest twin-set and her calf-length skirt, and she was efficient enough to spend large amounts of time buffing those fingernails without disturbing the quality of her service. He bestowed a patronizing smile on her.

He thought about Haliel as he got into his cream-colored Mercedes sedan; Haliel, the young seraph with the lack of proper respect for authority. He, Gabriel, had never been that impressionable; he had always known his place, ever since He had created him, which was why he remained His right-hand angel and administrative assistant. He had always been humble and responsible, unlike Michael, who had got into fast cars and drinking, and was on his way Down.

Gabriel supposed it was the influence of the weaponry: the Heavenly Soldier came into contact with lots of unheavenly soldiers, a breed famous for their lack of respect, cleanliness, sobriety and moral conviction. He tut-tutted and turned on his daytime running lights, keeping the Mercedes to a staid 30 miles an hour, five below the speed limit.

***************************************************************

Mephistopheles frowned at the computer, a Cray III terminal with a monitor roughly the size of a big-screen TV. It registered nothing apart from the words "Internal Error 28.3 Program Inoperable," and he had tried everything he knew to get it to acknowledge his commands. He was about to try the fourteenth-century tactic of smacking it hard when salvation, in the form of Ozymandias, appeared.

"Ozzy, my best friend in the world, have I told you lately that I love you?"

"What do you want?"

"You wound me," Mephistopheles said, his long eyelashes drooping. "Give us a hand with this recalcitrant machine, would you? It seems to be possessed."

Ozymandias, shaking his head, took his place behind the console and tapped in commands. It didn't take him long to locate the problem: the huge screen started flashing panels of meaningless characters in the form of bold letters: "Ha Ha."

"What the blazes is that supposed to mean?" Mephistopheles leant against the counter, arms folded. Ozymandias looked at him.

"We got a virus," he said shortly. "Nice one, too: it's fried the entire system. We're going to need to wipe the whole computer server and reinstall everything. I don't understand how it got in."

"Ask Beelzebub," Mephistopheles said, "he was fiddling with the system last night. You don't happen to know where I could get hold of some Darvon, do you?"

"You have a headache too?"

"The mother of all headaches. And it's undeserved," he added with the tone of one being unjustly dealt with, "I haven't touched a martini for days. Must be something in the air."

"No, I rather think it's an effect of His Lordship's own illness. Remember back when he and Michael had that big fight, and he was hurt? We all felt like hell. Anyway, there's no time for going in search of drugs, we've got to fix this bloody computer. Pull up a chair; this is likely to be a long job."

"You have a nasty streak of sadomasochism in you, Ozzy," sighed Mephistopheles, rubbing his temples. "Where do we start?"

******************************************************************

Alex woke up the next night in perfect health, as he always did after a spell of vampire sleep. He was in marvellous form, I noted with pleasure, and he had no intention of staying in bed. At least, not his bed. Mine is big enough for two, any night of the week.....

Afterwards, we lay with the great windows open on what was a very mild night for mid-September in London, and watched the moonlight make its way over the floor. They say that those who sleep in moonlight will go mad. I don't know if it's true....the moon spoke to us, as it sometimes does, calling us with the force of desire to scatter on her dark winds and become mist, forever. I laid my head on Alex's chest and refused the moon's invitation, politely, drawing circles on his pale skin with the tip of one finger. Moonthrall is a danger for young and inexperienced vampires: it is possible to lose control of your senses, become drunk and euphoric, answer that silver call, and not know how to come back. I remember my own experience with moonthrall as a caution.

I had been new-made, then, still living in the hot Persian deserts, dancing for hire in the tents of Alexander's men, visiting the King when Bagoas and Hephaistion were busy. We were lovers, of course: no woman could resist the fire within Alexander, though he spent most of his time with the Persian boy or Hephaistion, his first love. I pleasured him because I was quiet and pale and lovely, and could hold a conversation with him; his wife Roxane was dark and resentfully beautiful, and could not understand his lack of desire for her. I was there in the darkness when they brought his still form back from the Mallian battle, and I was there while they conferred in the anteroom about the likelihood of his survival. I remained as shadow or mist while Bagoas was there, but when he stepped out for water it was my touch which stirred him from where he lay in the open hand of death: so close to me, and so far away I could have wept, if my changed body could form the tears. Later, much later, when the swamp fever took hold in his chest and he accepted that he was to die, I did not leave him; I lived on nothing, for the weeks it took him to sink further and further beneath the surface; I myself was close to a second, and more painful death, when he left us for the last time. I remember so clearly the look on his face where he lay in the great bed of Nebuchadnezzar, in the hall which Darius the Great had built with mosaic pillars, under the sun of the country he had conquered at thirty-three: release, and regret. He could not live, of course: the few mortals allowed the kind of fire he possessed were burnt from within by its force, and died young. The breath of God, I once heard it called, is too powerful for the flute it plays: although the music is beautiful, it cannot be played for long....

After Alexander's death I went out into the night desert and fed like an animal, taking three soldiers past the turning point before I was satiated. I was sicker than I'd ever been that night, lying on the moonlit sands. Somewhere beyond the bloody haze that fogged my vision I heard a silver voice calling my name. Tamar....

What? I asked it, wretchedly.

Tamar....Tamar.....daughter.......

What do you want? Who are you?

Look up, child. Look into me. Let my light lave you, let me wash you clean. Scatter and sparkle like frost, Tamar, float in my light. Be redeemed through me.......

What is frost? I wondered. I lay still, and slowly the red haze before me cleared, and I felt a cool touch to my face, to my mind. My agony and my sorrow dissolved before that touch, like water washing away old blood. I felt disembodied, drunk: I wanted to become mist and evaporate in that silver light; I wanted to let go of my body and float away on the tide of silvered peace which washed over me.

Tamar, said the voice persuasively. Tamar, come with me into the night, forget your body, drift on my beams, become one with me.....

I heard beyond the silver another voice calling; a human voice, a man, and felt warm fingers on my face. Somatic sensation flooded through me, dulling the desire woken by the light, and I began to come back to myself: I lay in the arms of a man dressed in the Macedonian army corselet and tunic I knew so well. My fingers clutched at his armor, slid away; I could smell the warm blood so close to me, could almost taste it, and that desire slowly overrode the desire to drift forever on moonbeams, and forget my corporeal state.

"Lucius...?"

"Hush, Tamar, you're ill," the soldier told me. I knew him by name: he had been of the King's bodyguard, and we had been friends, and I had danced for him more than once. I let him live in his misconception, let him carry me back to the tents, where I lay in sated stupor for almost two nights before I left the Macedonian camp for the last time. I could not entirely forget that whispering silver voice speaking my name, but I was cautious not to let myself lie senseless beneath the full moon again.

**************************************************************

The celestial amphitheater is packed by now. The seesaw begins, very slowly, to rise from its nadir and return to its normal position. The massed gods lean forward, watching.

*************************************************************

"Doctor?"

Faust looked up from his newspaper to see Lilith standing in the doorway, ineffably desirable in a plain beige silk suit. "Yes?" he asked.

"Do you have a minute to come and examine his Lordship?"

Five minutes later they stood at Samael's bedside. The Lord of Hell was sitting up and demanding alcohol. Faust frowned and took his pulse, and Lilith sat down on the bed and raised a questioning eyebrow at the doctor.

"Astonishing," Faust murmured. "My lord, you've made quick progress. How do you feel?"

"In need of a stiff bourbon and maybe some Tylenol," Samael said, and retrieved his wrist from the doctor's fingers. "Stop fussing."

"There's almost no fever," Faust told Lilith, "his enervation seems to have disappeared, his breathing's easy....My lord, I'm confining you to bed for two more days. Tylenol you can certainly have, bourbon I forbid. Lilith, do you know what this means?" 

"The balance has begun to shift back," she said, over Samael's profane response. "How perfectly marvellous."

In the airconditioned computer vault in the basement of the sixth tower, Mephistopheles and Ozymandias looked at each other. "Do you feel what I feel?" Ozzy said.

"I do. Try the system again."

Ozzy tapped in a command on the aptly named Black Daemon laptop sitting on a convenient chair for access to the system: now, instead of the screen filling with meaningless characters, it merely told him "Starting Windows," rumbled a few times, and popped the familiar desktop background onscreen. "Ha," he said, and sat down, with satisfied exhaustion, on the bright cold floor. All around them the towers of the Cray IIIs blinked into light, and cooling fans hummed loudly. Mephistopheles put a hand to his forehead in surprise.

"Hey, my head stopped hurting," he said. "Come on, let's get out of here before we

freeze," and he helped Ozzy to his feet. "I hope this means I'm not going to be chief much longer. I'm not cut out to be the Adversary."

*****************************************************************

Gabriel woke up suddenly, in the dusk light that means dawn has begun, and lay staring into the shadows of his cream-colored ceiling. Something had happened, he knew, but he could not have said what. He looked at the phosphorescent dial of his Rolex, lying on the bedside table, and saw it was four-thirty in the morning.

He turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but couldn't. Whatever had woken him would not let him go: he was beginning to feel worried. The shift in the balances which had occurred some days ago had felt sort of like this, but less disturbing: there was something inevitable about the strangeness in the air, as if the universe had been waiting for it. He got up, slowly, put on an Armani dressing gown, and went to the kitchen, turning lights on by waving hands at them. Normally he disapproved of that particular practice, but he was too worried to care.

He fished through the collection of vitamin supplements and herbal medicines on the countertop, selected a Natural Medicinals tranquilizer. He did not believe in polluting the body with chemicals; he did not really believe in polluting the body with things like tranquilizers and sleep aids, but he had a meeting that afternoon, and he needed rest. He sat quietly at his polished pine country kitchen table, waiting for the capsules to take effect. It was five-fifteen when they did, and he went back to bed with the air of one who knows he won't be at his best on getting up.

Nevertheless, the valerian and echinacea had eased his nervous tension somewhat, and he slipped into sleep without much difficulty.

Haliel was there early, he noted on arriving at his office, and his blond secretary looked up as he passed by. "Sir?" she asked him diffidently.

"Yes, Susie?" he encouraged her.

"Sir, Mister Haliel says he would like to speak with you, if you have a moment," she told him. He sighed; he felt a little under the weather, a change from the burgeoning good health he had enjoyed for the past few days.

"All right, Susie. Give me five minutes, and then send him in."

"Thank you, sir." She shuffled papers on her desk, and he went into his office, made a few phone calls, and waited for the confrontation.

Millius wandered through crystal hallways. She indulged herself by getting lost in this palace: it lent an air of romantic innocence to the place, which she felt it badly needed. Of course, she could never really be lost: she could always open a rift between universes and step through to where she wanted to be, but she enjoyed wandering. As usual, Morpheus was busy, could not be found, was not to be disturbed: she recognized the faithful-dog routine which she was performing, and did not much care. If she could see him for fifteen minutes, fifteen years of waiting would have been worthwhile.

Anthropomorphic personifications are not supposed to fall prey to organic emotional difficulties. She had heard that countless times, and she still didn't know whether it was because she was made incorrectly or because the rules were incorrect that she could defy the principle.

She wished it were not so.

Riley, she knew with a corner of her mind, was not home. He had made it all the way to a convenient bench in King's Lynn before collapsing. The whore Sarah would find him there, beautiful and sorrowful and unjustly dealt with, and she would take pity on the man who had been her hunter, and help him home to his little apartment. Sarah had used some of the cash Tamar had lavished on her to purchase decent clothing, and Riley did not know her; even if he could have seen her face clearly through the shifting haze of pain, he would not have recognized the whore he had pursued. She smiled sharply: apart from the incident on the bridge which was trying hard to be the Pont au Change in another city, a century and more ago, the story had been barrelling along with no need for her to intervene.

She turned another corner, and came face to face with Morpheus's janitor, a character known for obvious reasons as Mervyn Pumpkinhead. He was like some of the things she had picked out of another Mervyn's head to form three tales of decay, tradition and abdication; like things she had seen in childrens' nightmares. He was in the process of lighting a cigarette from the butt of his previous one, and he looked up when she came around the corner.

"Well, well," he said, smoke trickling out of his triangular eyeholes, "if it ain't the broad with the white hair and the english accent. How you doing, babe? Haven't seen you round here recently."

"Oh, not too bad, Mervyn," she told him. "How's he doing?" She didn't need to use the name: "he" was sufficient.

"He's been dumped. Again." Mervyn dragged on the cigarette. "Some chick with glasses. Called Thessaly, or something like it. A witch."

"Oh dear," she said. "I suppose he's doing a lot of standing around on rainswept balconies, and staring out into the middle distance, and not finishing his sentences, right?"

"Yeah. Only this time he's doing a lot of coughing, too. Must be all the rainswept

balconies. You'd think he'd learn, after Nada, and that other chick. Oh well, don't ask me, I just work here," he said, with the air of the put-upon. Millius was staring at him.

"What do you mean, coughing? He's like me, he's an anthropomorphic personification. He can't get sick."

"Tell him that. Lucien can't get any sense out of him, either, he just says things like 'She has decided.....that she no longer loves me', and turns his back on us. I've got half a mind to call his big sister."

"You mean nobody's notified her yet? --Never mind, I'll deal with it. You haven't got another of those, have you?"

"What's it worth?"

"Me not taking one by force. Thank you," she said, lighting her cigarette with a glowing fingertip, something that surprised and terrified mortals when they saw it. Mervyn laughed merrily.

"My pleasure, babe. I guess you're off to minister to him in his time of need?"

"You guess right. See y'around," she said, and slid out of the corridor into the great Throne Room of the Dreaming's palace.

***********************************************************************

The archangels were having a meeting. Heaven's great boardroom table, stretching further than the human eye could see, was heaped and drifted with papers and printouts utilizing the very latest in computer technology for graphics and text art. The table itself was made out of one single immense cultured pearl, created by Mikimoto in a dream of unutterable wealth. Diamond chandeliers had until recently hung over the great table, until Gabriel had decided that they were out of touch with the New Executive Style, and had ripped them out and replaced them with wall niches carved out of solid frosted diamond. He had wanted to retain the diamond idiom: it pleased him. Donuts had also until recently been served at any lengthy meeting, which had been disapproved of by Gabriel, and phased out. He was a great devotee of carrot sticks and tofu. There had been muttering in Heaven about the tofu, but Gabriel was Gabriel, replacement for Samael as God's right-hand angel, and his word was, if not Holy Writ, at least law. Crunching sounded from the seven angels, most of them dressed in Bill Blass or Hugo Boss, with the occasional Calvin Klein rugged touch here and there. (The upper levels, the Thrones and Principalities and Cherubim and the rest, were above this sort of interpersonal communication, and existed in their own highly electronic utopia, communicating via digital PCS.)

"I call this meeting to order," Gabriel said, and shuffled papers. "Michael, report. How is the construction going?"

Michael, who had taken it into his head to build a St Michael's Mount on top of Heaven (to the glory of God, of course) rummaged around in his fatigues for the report. "We need more pearls," he said. "We're on budget, just about, but the grant for decoration was way too small. Most of the infrastructure is completed, including the framework for the spire on the abbey tower. Look, we were thinking about maybe continuing the sapphire battlements deal to include some cannon emplacements. Just cosmetic, of course. I mean, er, it looks better with some guns sticking out between the blocks of sapphire, don't you think?"

Gabriel sighed and rubbed at his temples. "Michael, you know how he feels about offensive weapons."

"But the ballistic possibilities are amazing!" Michael insisted. "We command the entire sector of the universe from where we are; we've built Heaven on a rise above Limbo. Put guns on the battlements and you have an invulnerable fortress! It's just crying out for some heavy artillery!"

"Sit down, Michael," Gabriel said. "No guns for you. Yes, you can have more pearls _if_ you put in a request along official channels for them and _if_ you're not planning to use them as B.B.s, okay?" Michael, sullen, sat down.

"Uriel. Tell us about your new concept for the Gates."

Uriel, who was a cross between an architect and a PR person, pushed the steel-rimmed Armani glasses he affected up on his lovely nose. "Well, we were originally considering a modernization of the existing gates," he began, "you know, carrying on the tradition, incorporating some new aspects, maybe straightening up the lines and putting some brushed steel in the whole design just to tweak it a bit. But we've come up with something I personally like very much. Look," and he unveiled an architect's watercolor sketch of the Gates of Heaven. Instead of the pearly lyres which had symbolized Heaven since the days of Victorian portrait painters, the sketch outlined a rectangular Lloyd Wright portal in peach and grey glass, carved with lilies and bordered with stainless steel pillars. Most amusing, though, was the automatic eye that opened the doors to all who came within its range.

Gabriel nodded tersely. "Very nice. How much is it going to cost?"

"We haven't worked that out yet. But you like it?"

"It has a certain charm. Go and talk to the Bursar, Uriel.

"Right. I've called this meeting mainly to discuss the fluctuations in the powerline between ourselves and our opponents. Several days ago the angel Haliel approached me having noticed a shift in our favor, suggesting that we investigate. I refused to implement his suggestion since the shift was in our favor. Now, however, the balance has begun to return to normal. This by itself need not concern us: my worry is that having returned to normal it will continue to descend to favor our enemies. Do you have any suggestions as to steps we might take to counteract this possibility?"

"Um," said Michael, and Gabriel just _knew_ he was going to say something about gun emplacements. He held up a hand.

"Nonviolent suggestions, I hardly need remind you," he added. Michael subsided.

He looked around the small cluster of archangels, occupying perhaps one seventieth of the space of the great table. No hands were raised.

Millius made her way through Byzantium's golden crosses to the dark necropolitan streets of Pere Lachaise in the rain of an autumn evening, getting closer. Morpheus's throne room was as mutable as Morpheus, and difficult to find.

Ah. A small cottage on the windswept Normandy coast, close to St Malo: rain, on beaches scarred by the deaths of many tanks, far out in the bay guarded by concrete behemoths made to be sunk. Arromanches; Gold Beach. Why was he here?

He stood by the windows, looking out over the great expanse of choppy sea, his tall form draped in something nondescript which might have been a military greatcoat. Curiouser and curiouser, she thought, moving forward into the reality of this particular dream.

"My lord?" she said softly.

He whirled at the sudden noise, and she was shocked at how ill he looked. He was not normally confidence-inspiring, but the change in him was remarkable. He had gone beyond his normal falling-snow pallor to a greyish-white, his eyes too huge in his thin face. More than thin, he was emaciated, almost grotesque. She thought, He looks like the wind is blowing through his bones.

"Millius. What are you doing here?" he said, his voice less like wet silk over slate, more like the last breeze touching the leaves of a dying tree. She held on to her diplomatic expression with the effort of sheer experience.

"I came to see how you were," she told him. "Mervyn says you've been ill."

"Mervyn," he repeated, turning back to the windows, an expression of unutterable longing on his face. Before him the French coast shifted, becoming nothing but darkness, the chill of the void: the room lost its homey comfort, expanding, hardening, becoming a hall made all of grey granite on the edge of some unimaginable abyss. "Mervyn doesn't know the half of it."

She almost reached out a hand to him: it seemed as if he might fall. "What can I do?" 

"Not a damned thing," he told her almost ruefully. "No, this is my fault. She decided this was not for her. I could have given her....worlds, strung together as jewels. I could have given her anything."

"Perhaps she didn't want worlds," Millius murmured. She could only dream of what the witch Thessaly had known, but understood the gulf that stood between Morpheus and any of his lovers. There was so much there, and so little of it was touchable. He looked at her with the infinite and original confusion of a man trying to understand the mystery of woman. Which, she thought afterwards, was strange. He could be anything he pleased......

"What do you know about the fluctuations between heaven and hell?" she asked, changing the subject violently. He raised an eyebrow, coughing ever so slightly, his shoulders shivering.

"Not more than you, I imagine. The Gates of Horn and Ivory insulate me from the

temporal world. All I know is what I see in their dreams."

"What do they dream of tonight?" she asked.

"Many things, as usual: Jack Higgins is asleep on Jersey in the middle of a Channel storm: Queen Elizabeth is dreaming of the NASCAR circuit, Chelsea Clinton is dreaming of being an ordinary child. There's a lot of longing in the worlds tonight," he added straight-faced, as he always was. She smiled.

"I take it you don't get Samael's dreams here?"

"Oh, I get everyone's dreams. He's driving a Bentley down a small-town street and picking up hitchhikers as he's going along: the car is nearly full. There's an undercurrent of hope."

"Well, that's good, I suppose," she said. "Look, the balance is swinging back. I believe strongly that we're going to have a surge of popularity for Hell any time now, and after that a smaller return for Heaven, and so on. But what precipitated this?"

He didn't answer. Again the longing clouded his face.

"Look, Morpheus. Are you all right, or is Mervyn more than usually perceptive?"

"I've been better," he told her. "There's nothing you can do. When my kingdom builds up power again, I will regain my strength. I am tired, Millius, more tired than I remember ever being before." Again, he was coughing: just a little catch in each breath, a shaking of his slender shoulders. It was strangely elegant.

She did reach out to him then, put her cool fingers to his temple; she let some of her own strength drift along the contact between them, allowed diffusion to do its thing. He reached up to pull her hand away, but the power she gave him changed his mind, and he merely covered her fingers with his own. They stood like that for some moments, before Millius gently took away her hand.

"Goodbye," she told him. "I will come back if I learn anything new."

Samael was allowed up. He slipped out of bed, magnificently naked, and strolled over to his great windows. From here he commanded all of Hell, more or less: the eight towers of Dis were arranged at the tips of radial spokes centering on the First Circle. He looked down, beyond the Wood of Suicides, to the slow and sorrowful waters of his five rivers. The border Styx glinted like silver, far off towards the edge; the four others drained into the great fiery lake Avernus. Avernus' waters were as close to a spa cure as Hell ever came: the combination of Lethe, Cocytus, Phlegethon and Acheron produced a sort of heavy water full of sorcery, tradition, power and sulfur dioxide. He could see the marble pavillions down by the lake's edge, where demons came for their long weekends to drink, bathe in the effervescing, flaming waters, and chat each other up.

He felt marvelous. He didn't know whether this was a function of the return to normalcy or whether the swing in the opposite direction had already begun, but he didn't much care. Out of ether he created a silk dressing gown in pure white, the color of his wings bleached in the flames of Lake Avernus, so long ago he could hardly remember the day, and assumed it, throwing wide his great windows on the new day.

Hell's sunlight, for its inmates, filtered through red smoky quartz: clear light like that of the worlds above never made it down to the pits where they lay. Up where Samael stood, the light was like fine wine, beautiful and intoxicating and sharp. He stood on his circular balcony and simply breathed in the rarefied atmosphere of his domain. This had been God's great mistake, he reflected, banishing him to the deepest pits of the world below: he had given him his own world to play with. Samael's considerable talents had not been wasted. His Hell was magnificent, classic and yet innovative: the sinners met their just desserts, of course, as they were meant, but Samael himself and his rebel angels, after the first few shaky days, had never looked back. There was no reason why they couldn't enjoy themselves, they realized, since God was too busy, and too fastidious, to make sure their existence was as unpleasant as their charges'. They set themselves up as self-indulgent hedonists with only one known job: to make sure that souls sent to them were punished, and punished in the correct ironic manner. Apart from that their time was their own, and they made good use of it. Some of Heaven's host envied them their freedom, and had on occasion slid down into Hell on a Friday night to spend the weekend in heady pleasure. Gabriel did not of course know of this. Heaven thought it kinder not to tell him.

He strolled down the grand staircase, still clad in yards of snowy silk, to the sixty-first floor Grand Plaza. At his entrance, all activity ceased. He smiled, bathing the Plaza in the power of that smile, and continued out into the room, like a debutante. Mephistopheles and Ozymandias were leaning on the polished diamond bartop that ran halfway around the room. He joined them.

"Good morning, my Lord," they greeted him. "What'll you have?"

"I suppose it's a bit early for Canton Red," he mused, "a dry martini, if you'd be so kind," and he gave the bartender a slightly upgraded version of the smile. "Mephistopheles, how goes the burden of command?"

"You're welcome to it, my Lord," the demon said fervently. "The computer system crashed while you were indisposed. It was Ozzy who saved the entire underworld from collapse," he added. Ozymandias inclined his head with infernal modesty.

"Actually," he said, "it was the cosmic balance. We'd been slaving over the blessed thing for hours when the favor began to swing back to normal, and suddenly the whole virus was cleaned out. It's nothing compared to what's going to happen when the year two thousand begins."

"Oh, bugger," Samael agreed, "I'd forgotten that. Was that one of ours?"

"I believe so. Not a very well-thought out one. I mean, they might have exempted our system," Mephistopheles complained. "Oh well. We're getting drunk, as you may have noticed, in celebration. Have another martini."

"I think I'll do that," he said. "Where's Lilith?"

"Czech Republic. Appearing as a hematite statue for some anthropologists whom we hope to corrupt."

"Isn't that a bit fourteenth-century? I mean, working individually at one soul?"

"Four souls, actually. Yes, but Lilith says she needed a bit of good old-fashioned tempting. We must not be good enough for her."

Three demons laughing beneath a crystal sky, and three hundred thousand miles away, a vampire turns over in her sleep.

I woke up to the sounds of laughter. Alex was already awake, watching what looked like Dr Who. I moaned and pulled the covers over my face, but I could still hear him laughing.

"Tamar, you gotta see this," he said. "They're on Thoros Beta...that's Sil's home planet, remember Sil, he was in Vengeance on Varos?...and they've got Brian Blessed doing a barbarian king and showing all his teeth. It's hilarious. Look!"

I looked. Last time I had seen Brian Blessed he was playing Exeter in Henry V. The difference was pronounced. He was striding around badly-mocked-up rock corridors and hissing. I sat up and leaned on Alex, who put his arm around me absently. The scene shifted to some kind of operating theater, where a green slimy alien lay on a table. A blond man in a doctor's coat stood over him flipping switches, and I squealed at Alex when I saw the man's features.

"That's Patrick Ryecart!! What the blazes is he doing in a terrible show like this?"

"Hey, not another word against the show, okay?" Alex told me solemnly. "This is not something I will let you dis. I am obsessed with this show."

"I know, and with Red Dwarf, and Knight Rider, and...." He silenced me in a very effective fashion. I abandoned the argument for culture, and gave as good as I got.

"It was Lucifer," I murmured much later. "Lucifer and some others; Mephistopheles, I think. Now what do they have to laugh about?"

"Maybe they've won the lottery," he said into my hair, not paying attention to the names.

"Maybe they have. Move, lover, I grow hungry." I slid out from under his arm and began to dress. "You want to come with, or shall I bring you something?"

"I'll come with. I think I'm beginning to atrophy," he said with a groan as he divested himself of the bedcovers. "Oh dear oh dear, whatever shall I wear?"

I threw a pair of leather pants and a hamlet shirt at him. "Try these. I'm going for the corrupted-maiden look tonight."

I wore what might have been considered Victorian underwear. White shift with a corset over it, laced-up heeled boots. Only the shift was ripped and torn, lace hanging off it in shrouds, and my white throat put the fabric to shame. He looked at me, and his eyes widened almost imperceptibly. He left off tying the shirt laces together and pulled on a pair of high leather boots.

"Will I do?"

"Perfectly," I told him. Together we descended our staircase and came out into the night, scenting warm blood on the night wind, not far away.

We had been right. A group of punks were hanging at the Embankment, smoking weed and making adolescent jokes. It was the work of a moment to creep into their circle as mist and solidify, grabbing two when they broke and ran; Alex came out of the shadows and made faces at them. They didn't appreciate his genius, he saw, and laughed, showing all his teeth. I like adrenaline in the blood: it makes it sharper. Too much has a souring effect, of course, and it can't be left: it must be drunk directly after the fright, or it begins to decay.

I handed Alex a punk and sank my own teeth into the great throat vein of the other. The effect of the weed was only slight: they were hardly into it. Druggies don't taste very nice, but these were just beginning down that wide and bonny road.

We took enough to satisfy ourselves and let the boys go; they would have fallen.

Together, we bore them out of the thoroughfare and laid them on a bench nearby, white and sweating. They were in shock, but not deep; they would live. I firmly believed that it would be a long, long time before either of them touched anything stronger than tobacco again.

Are we so very immoral?

Samael was reading over the proofs for his latest biography. Milton stood at the window, hands clasped behind his back, his shoulder-length hair limp and lank.

_The warhost of Lucifer lay breathless and half-conscious on the burning lake. The fall from Heaven had been a long one, preceded by unthought-of resistance from Michael's own host. Lucifer had not expected such wrath._

_That had been his first mistake, and his last one. He came back to himself, found his body largely unchanged from its heavenly state: his wings were bleached white, he saw, from the heatless flames' chemical action, but their great span was undiminished. He floated on the surface of the lake; its waters were far denser than normal water. Far in the distance he made out a blasted plain, flame-scorched and sterile. It would be an improvement over this, he thought._

_"How thou art fallen from heaven," he told himself wryly, "O Lucifer, son of the morning," and he shook off the cursory chains binding him. He rose into the rarefied air, his great wings finding no difficulty in supporting him, and saw below Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Mammon, Moloch, Baal, Belial and the others. "Rise up, my friends," he called to them. "You fought valiantly against insurmountable odds--but we have shaken him. He is frightened; that is why he has cast us down. Follow me to dry land. We still can fly, at least."_

_One by one the rebel angels, the demon kings of earth and Limbo, rose up out of the fiery lake and joined him on the shore._

_He surveyed his ranks. For the first time he saw exactly what he had done. They, reasonably innocent, had fallen from Heaven for his own guilt and hubris: he had failed, and he had pulled down a third of Heaven with him._

_But a third of Heaven? Surely they would not all have followed him had they not truly believed?_

_He pushed away the accusations and the guilt. They had not spoken a word of mutiny or rebellion against him: they were bearing this for his sake, and try as he might he could not find one pair of eyes that regarded him with anything less than love._

_"It seems my estimation of the armies of Heaven was in error," he said. "Yet we gave them a good fight, for all that. I saw Michael look in desperation to his ruler as we fought. No other but the Almighty could possibly have won against such force as we have shown. But, my friends, my followers, my compatriots, this place is ours. Not a prison: not a place of punishment for us. We rule here, as we could never have done in Heaven. He is not our ruler anymore._

_"What difference," he continued, warming to his subject, "does it make where we are, if I remain the same? I...we....have not changed. Our minds alone can make a hell of Heaven, or a Heaven of Hell. It is better to have autonomy. We reign in Hell; we could only serve in Heaven. Did I not say, 'I will not serve'?"_

_They looked around themselves. "We are free," he pointed out. "He will not disturb us here; he did not make this place to keep his Argus-eye on us. This domain is what we make of it. And we will have revenge on him, I swear. We all heard him boasting of the world he was going to make for a race he had yet to create; his pet project, one he's been looking forward to for a while. I suggest we shift tactics; force has yielded us little, apart from our own land to do with as we please. It is time to use our guile. We must invent a stratagem to introduce our revenge into his world; he cannot be expecting that, nor will he be able to defend it from our influence."_

_Murmurs of assent arose from the angel host. They looked a bit bedraggled, but that was a function of the burning waters and the day of falling. He thought they had borne up rather well._

_"We must build a palace. Yes, Mammon?"_

_"My lord, I notice that that hill over there has a particular metallic sheen. I think there might be gold here."_

_"Can you get it out?"_

_Hours later he surveyed the shore. Mammon and his fellow metallurgists had extracted gold ore, as he had predicted, and he and Hephaistos were busy refining the liquid metal using the flames from the burning lake. A temple-palace in the Doric style was rising by the shore, in gold and the white marble some of the other angels had found hard by. He looked up at the vault of the sky, visible through a thick haze. Something would have to be done about the fires that burned out of control. Perhaps they could be harnessed to create power for his new empire._

_Beyond the haze he could see the crystalline blue of the vault between his new home and his old one. He looked up towards heaven. "Did you really expect me to just lie there and feel sorry for myself? I made a mistake, but you have made a greater one. Had you wished to hold me prisoner forever, you should have kept me closer to your authority; or you should have destroyed me when you had the chance. I grow more powerful by the minute, old Father, and you cannot understand me, nor can you hold me back. You have given my angels a new kingdom to enjoy: you have given me my own empire. A pity you won't see what I can do with it."_

He looked up at Milton. "Very nice," he said. "Although the dialogue could be improvedupon. Have a drink."

"Thank you," the writer said fervently and applied himself to the house Salignac. Samael raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything. He supposed living in Hell was hard on Milton. But then, eternal boredom in Limbo would have been harder. They had given Milton his sight back: they thought that was a pretty good payment, one thing and another being what they were.

Sarah paced. She did it with a lot more grace than she had been used to because she was no longer wearing stilettos: her little feet were clad respectably in three-inch Manolo Blahnik heels to match her ivory wool pantsuit. It was a relief to be clothed for once. Thanks to Tamar, she not only was wearing more square yardage but was also staying in an upmarket hotel until she got her act together. It was still amazing to her that this time last week she had been poorer than poor and selling what remained of her body in order to eat.

Riley was on her mind. Having collected her daughter from the charity hospital, her primary worry was over, and she had more time to think about him. She hadn't seen him since the incident involving a bench in King's Lynn but she had a good idea of what he was doing: working himself sick. With the strange feeling of role-reversal that had come over her, she couldn't help worrying about the man who might have put her behind bars. He had looked so ill lying there in his rain-drenched Burberrys coat; like some kind of Dickensian hero down on his luck. And she had just happened to be walking along that particular sidewalk, and had seen him stagger, fall, lie sprawled gracelessly on the bench, and had brought him round and helped him home. It was fresh in her mind, although it had been three days.

His house was scarcely better than the rooms she had been living in, although there was no drug trash on the floor; the ceiling obviously leaked like a sieve, and the walls were beginning to crumble. She had seen him safely inside, and returned to her original objective. But she couldn't help worrying.

She put down the string of pearls she had been toying with, and assumed her new Karan coat. Dusk was falling, and Tamar and her lover should be awake soon, and there would be talk.

Riley lay on his moth-eaten sofa, dead to the world. Beside him in the dust-dampened apartment the phone rang, on and on, like a demanding child. The noise filtered down through layers of fatigue; he stretched out a hand without opening his eyes, and plucked the receiver from its cradle.

"Riley?!" it squawked at him. The mention of his name brought him further out of it, and he found his voice.

"DCI Chamberlain?" he managed. The phone buzzed with feedback from the roaring at the other end of the line.

"Riley, what the fuck are you playing at? You're an hour late for the bust! Get your arse down here, or this time tomorrow you're on the dole. Riley! You hear me?"

The bust. Oh bleeding hell. "Yessir," he said. "I'm sorry sir. I'm on my way. It won't happen again."

"Damn right it won't." Chamberlain cut the connection with a resounding clunk, and Riley dropped the receiver back with total lack of enthusiasm. He managed to get his legs over the side of the couch, and from there mustered the strength to sit up.

"Ohhhh," he said. The room swelled and sank around him, with drifting layers of pain. He held on to the table with one hand and got to his feet, moving to the small kitchen area where a gas ring and a sink managed to remain untouched amid the chaos of the apartment. He found a few small bottles in a cabinet and got himself a glass of water, then had to sit down again. He couldn't remember feeling this bad for a long, long time.

Percodan and bennies, he thought, coughing; breakfast of champions. Maybe even some valium, if he could have afforded it. The drugs were all that was left of his first aid kit. He swallowed a handful of benzedrine and waited until the edges of things slid into focus, took three painkillers, gulped down the last of the water, and put on his coat. The immediacy of the amphetamine would keep him going for a few hours: long enough to discharge his responsibility to the citizens of London. He hoped.

He walked hurriedly through the darkening streets. His chest was on fire, he noted dimly: another complaint to add to his lengthening list. His throat felt tight and scratchy, and the air moved slowly in his lungs. He ticked the symptoms off mechanically, and mechanically ignored them. The arc-mercury lamps seemed brighter than usual tonight.

Chamberlain looked him up and down and yelled quietly at him when he arrived. He accepted the criticisms with a meekly bowed head and promised to do better in future. Chamberlain looked hard at him, but threw off the affair with a Pilate-like hand washing gesture.

"Go on in. They've been waiting for you."

Mendoza looked up from her station behind the parked Ghia Escort. "There you are," she hissed, in fury. "You've jeopardized this entire operation, do you understand? Where the hell were you?"

"I overslept," he said evenly, but lost the dignity of the remark in a fit of coughing, jamming the pickup mike into his collar and the receiver into his ear. Mendoza sputtered at him. He ignored her, tapped in commands on the mobile computer unit. She looked over his shoulder.

The computer beeped at him. "Access denied," it said smugly. He frowned. Mendoza was staring at him with something akin to fear on her face.

"Riley," she said.

"What."

"The password. It's not Creaker. It's Javert."

He nodded distantly. "Oh. How silly of me."

"Riley. Let me see your eyes."

"What?"

"Just do it," she said, grabbing at his shoulder, and he didn't have the strength to resist her. She drew in a long breath, staring full into his face. He knew what the amphetamine did to his eyes. He looked away.

"Riley," she said, softer now. "You know the penalty for using drugs on duty."

"Drugs?" he coughed. "No, not hardly, just a couple of bennies. I'm fine."

"Fine?" she repeated. He nodded, coughing again, harder now. The pain in his chest had increased.

"I'm going in. Tell them to cover me."

"Stop, Riley, you're not going anywhere in that state. You're an embarrassment to the Met, Riley, I don't believe what I'm seeing......Riley? Are you okay?"

He hadn't been able to stop coughing this time. The spasms shook him like a leaf in high wind. The edges of the world went grey; he could just about hear Mendoza saying something about embarrassment when the strength of his knees went, and he pitched forward on his face on the wet concrete, and went on falling down into a grey void. The squawking of the audio pickup in his ear was the last thing he heard.

"Oh, shit," Mendoza said quietly, took his pulse. She touched her own mike. "Chamberlain, send in backup, Riley's down. No, I'll handle it. Yeah. Yeah, I noticed it too. Right." She beckoned one of the plainclothesmen to stay with Riley while she crept back to her unit and unracked the dashboard radio set. "Myrtle, this is XR-7, over," she said into it, leaning heavily on the car doorframe. The dispatcher responded, and she gave a string of codes that meant in civilian terms that an officer was down and there was need of an ambulance and EMTs on scene, only they'd have to do it real quiet-like because of the bust. Behind her she heard the order to move, and the sound of a lot of coppers from the Met making like snakes and slithering their way into a supposedly-abandoned warehouse. Having done the official part, she allowed herself to answer the dispatcher's questions.

"No, no, nothing like that. It's going according to plan. Riley's hurt, or sick, or something. --I don't know! I'm not a paramedic. He just collapsed. Yeah, Mr Strong-and-Silent himself.....ironic, mmm-hmm....okay, the ambulance just arrived. Roger that. Out," and she racked the mike and went back to where Riley lay pale and still on the wet tarmac.

"How is he," she demanded of the plainclothesman.

"Same. Breathing a little labored, fast uneven pulse, fever."

"Okay. The ambulance's here. Go get the paramedics. Quietly!"

Later, much later, after the bust had gone down and Jose Numez was in custody, Mendoza stood in the ICU of Mercy Hospital and cursed herself.

"Did you notice any strange behavior or symptoms before he collapsed?" the doctor asked, disinterestedly flipping pages on her clipboard.

"He was coughing. And I think he'd been using some kind of speed, his pupils were huge. He looked really sick." She ran a hand through her cropped hair. "Look, how long is it likely to be before he can go back to work? What's wrong with him?"

"Frankly," the doctor said, looking up at her at last, "I'm amazed he's remained ambulatory this long considering what he's got. You name it....amphetamine crash, chronic migraine, physical exhaustion, dehydration, vitamin deficiency, low-grade chest infection, anemia.....How long have you been noticing symptoms? Has he ever complained or requested sick leave?"

"Never," Mendoza murmured. "I had no idea."

She turned and put her palms to the glass partition. Behind it, Riley lay looking awfully small and vulnerable, an oxygen tube taped to his face, at least three drips set into his elbow vein; electrodes ran in a forest of multicolored wire from his chest to a stern-looking machine monitoring his heartbeat. His face was no longer grey, but the dark pools surrounding his eyes looked worse in the light of the ICU ward. She looked back over the past weeks, saw a thousand little indications that he was sick, things she had ignored with the ease of long practice. This could have been averted, she thought sickly. It didn't have to be this way.

"He'll pull through, right?" she said to the doctor, who raised an eyebrow.

"We'll do our best," she said. "I can't of course guarantee he'll recover.....these chest infections are dicey at best...but I'm hopeful. If it weren't for his deteriorated state of general physical health the chances would be a lot better."

"That's the best you can do?"

"I said we'll do our best. We've got him on parenteral nutrition right now, glucose and saline, iron, multivitamins, electrolytes, antibiotics and painkillers. Time will tell; he could come out of this tomorrow, or two weeks from now." The doctor's beeper went off, and she looked up at Mendoza. "Excuse me. Look, uh, Commander, the best thing you can do for him right now is put him on extended sick leave and go back to work. Don't blame yourself for this. It's nobody's fault."

She hurried away to a wall phone. Mendoza took the hint and left, after a last look at Riley's still form amid the machinery.

I woke, cold. Alex had dragged all the bedclothes to his side, for which offense I planted my icy foot in the small of his back. He came awake with a shriek.

"Serves you right," I told him, and fended off his attack with my pillow. "Come on, get up, I think we're going to be doing a little species propagation. How are you feeling tonight?"

"Absolutely bloody marvellous," he said. "You need my strength?"

"I do."

Wordlessly he gave me his wrist. I looked at him with green eyes and slid into the vein, hungrily. Somewhere inside I was still aware of the danger and the need for caution, and held back on the bloodlust. Alex's blood, more powerful, rich and concentrated, laced with the indescribable sweetness of eons of adulteration, suffused my mind. At last he pulled away and licked the wound to close it; I was already gone, drifting into crimson tides, scarlet waters closing over my head. I knew from experience it would take about an hour for Alex's blood to mingle with my own, for the power of our combined ancestries to surface in my strength and give me the endurance I needed to make another of our kind.

For me as woman, everything comes back to blood: all roads are stained with it, all thoughts and paths of righteousness run with the stuff. Woman-blood, slow-flowing and steeped in meaning and mystery; the crimson lace of childbirth, the susurration of bloodflow in the ears of the child floating in the red dark of the womb; moon-power draws blood, I am drawn by both blood and the moon, I am created anew every time I bathe in the red surge, every time I drink, every time I create another child of darkness. It is right for me in a way I don't think any male could ever understand. Women are different; the woman-mystery, the blood-mystery, and the moon are all connected with ties that only womens' eyes can see. I am reborn in the mixed surge of my lover's blood and mine, and his strength becomes my strength.

I opened my eyes. The heady drunkenness was gone, replaced by strangely heightened senses, similar to what it was when I was first born to night. Alex stood over me, pale but smiling.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Lethal."

He went downstairs. I knew Sarah would come in the same way I knew the moon would grow and wane in cycles. I waited.

Sarah's heels made little tapping noises in impatience as she waited for the taxi driver to give her change. Her child, the eight-month-old Mary, was fussing, and she bounced her gently on her hip, pointing out to the baby Tamar's great rowhouse, the corner house of the street, glowing for her with welcome and anticipation. At last the man collected the bills and relinquished them, reluctantly, and she ran up to the door and knocked lightly on the old wood.

Tamar's lover answered the door. Alex, she remembered his name quickly, and was grateful. Her daughter wriggled in her arms, reaching out her little hands to the tall blond man.

"May I?" Alex asked, and she smiled up at him and handed him her child. She took off her coat and draped it over a nearby chair. The vampire was holding the baby very carefully, supporting her head in the textbook manner, and exclaiming over her physical features. "Oh, wow!" he said, turning back to Sarah, "she has little fingernails! They're like glass....I didn't know people could be this small!" Mary, who knew a pushover when she saw one, thrust out a miniature fist and grabbed Alex's forefinger with a delighted grin before inserting it in her mouth. Sarah smiled in gratitude at him. "I think she likes me," he said, sounding very solemn.

"Oh, she does," she assured him, "she only tries to eat people if she's very taken with them. You may want to recapture your finger: her powers of suction are pretty amazing."

Behind her a door opened. The feeling of pleasant company in the room suddenly altered to one of barely-concealed power. Sarah turned and saw Tamar, dressed only in her astonishing and floor-length hair, standing in the doorway.

"Have you decided?" Tamar said, and her voice was subtly changed. It was as if more than one person was speaking when she formed the words.

Sarah nodded and stubbed out her cigarette with decided force.

"I have," she said. "Give me your gift."

Tamar took her by the hands and led her into an adjoining room. There seemed to be nothing but themselves in the chamber; her world was filled with Tamar, with the musky, rose scent of her, her incredible hair seeming to glow in the dim light, to flake off chips of light that fell slowly to their feet, curling around themselves with prehensile force. Sarah felt drunk, though she hadn't touched anything that day. Tamar's fingers on her wrists were like steel, though the grip was painless; all she could see was the vampire's inhuman beauty, her full, sensual lips, her brilliant green eyes like emerald cabochons, the velvet perfection of her skin. Tamar drew her closer, her hair coiling like snakes around Sarah's shoulders, kissed her. Sarah moaned in indescribable, sweet agony: Tamar's lips descended to her cheek, her throat, and the kiss grew stronger, and there was pain in it.

Afterward, Sarah would liken the memory of the kiss to a kind of deflowering: ecstasy unlike anything she had ever known, sharpened and sweetened with delicate pain. The world came and went in great red rose-scented swoops. She felt herself falling, felt the rhythm of her heart falter, felt the other woman's arms supporting her and keeping her from collapsing. The pain receded, the feeling of sensual pleasure slid away from her. She opened her eyes, struggled to focus. Tamar's crimson hair surrounded her; the world was made of it. From far away inside the ringing of her ears she heard the vampire's voice.

"I have drained you to the point of death," Tamar was saying. "You must decide. If I leave you like this, you will die. If you desire life and power and beauty, answer me. Yes or no."

"....yes...."

And now there was something pressed against her lips, and a strange sharp wonderful scent filled her world. She tasted wetness, the shock of it repelling her, before the taste overtook her mind and she grasped at the wrist Tamar offered her and sucked and sucked and sucked as if she could never let go. The rhythm of her own heart was echoed by another, slower, inhuman, and she felt the warm sweet heady blood fill her body, felt it rush along her drying veins, felt the bright shock of it through her brain, through her skin, felt the new turgor of her body, felt the warmth fulfil her desperate need. Tamar was saying something, pulling away, and she clasped the wrist tighter, bestial, begging for more. The vampire's strength was fading, but it was still greater than her own, and she could not resist as Tamar reclaimed her wrist and sat back, breathing heavily.

She felt stranger and stranger. Now that the blood was out of reach the desperate need for it was fading, replaced by a growing agony in her bones and flesh. She cried out in pain, writhing. Tamar's voice was close to her ear.

"It's all right," the vampire assured her. "Your body's dying. It will take some hours, after which you will sleep, and wake like us, one of us, and the whole world will be waiting for you."

She felt something soft under her head, cool fingers on her cheek, and then there was nothing but the agony, white and brown and searing.

In the celestial amphitheater, the enormous balance has reached level, and swung back through level to the opposite of its original orientation. The end that was at zenith is approaching nadir.

Gabriel, sitting in his office, rubbed at his temples. He felt sick; dizzy, nauseated, tired, with a headache that wouldn't go away. He considered knocking off early and going home to bed, but his innate belief in keeping office hours sprang up and knocked down the weak desire to pamper the flesh. Haliel was waiting to see him. He knew what it would be about.

He took a deep breath and buzzed Susie. "Send Haliel in," he said, swallowing hard.

The door opened and Haliel came in, looking rather ill himself. "Sir, I'm afraid the balance has shifted again. This time it's in Hell's favor."

"I know," Gabriel snapped. "Why do you think things have been going wrong all day? First the power outage, then the recording angels' strike, and of course the fact that we're all feeling unwell suddenly....Have you any real news to report?"

"Er, no, sir. A lot of the angels are quitting early. Michael's disappeared, and a meeting had to be adjourned because all of the Thrones and Powers and a couple of Principalities were sick. The cherubim are worst affected, we think. We haven't had any news from Himself.."

"I think we'd better leave Him alone. If it gets worse the higher your rank is, as I believe is the case, He won't appreciate any disturbances." He passed a hand over his face, willing the disorientation and nausea away. "This is obviously a ploy by Hell. They underestimate our strength, Haliel. They think Heaven won't be able to muster a defense, and they're going to take the opportunity to attack. Find Michael and get the guards on double duty. They won't find us so easy to take over."

"But sir, if Hell experienced what we're going through now, doesn't that mean it's not their work?"

"Part of the ploy, Haliel. They wanted us to think just that. Now go! Find Michael!"

Haliel closed the door behind him. This place was getting impossible.

He dialed Michael's cell phone number. Eighteen rings, and the Heavenly Soldier's voice finally answered, sounding decidedly unhappy.

"What," Michael said.

"Uh, hello, this is Haliel, in public relations.....Gabriel's ordered you to get all the guards on double duty. He seems to think this is some kind of ploy by Hell and that they're going to attack while we're all stumbling around feeling awful. Er."

"Haliel," croaked Michael, "tell him from me to go and guard the frigging ramparts himself if he feels that strongly about it. Me, I'm staying right here with a bottle of Anacin and an icepack. And if he'd let me put guns on the battlements we'd be twice as defensible." The connection was cut with a sudden click.

"Bugger," Haliel remarked. Why is it always that responsibilities like this devolve on me? Gabriel is not gonna like this.....

"Gabriel's office," the perky secretary answered when he dialed the familiar number.

"Susie, it's Haliel, and Michael's refusing to obey Gabriel's orders. He said....well, he said he wasn't feeling in any shape to go and stand guard on the battlements. Could you..."

"Patch you through to him? Sure," Susie said and quickly redirected the call. Haliel sighed; she wasn't as dumb as she looked. It was going to be a long hard afternoon.

Lilith and Samael were enjoying some good old-fashioned sinful debauchery. They lay in Samael's hot tub, glasses of champagne standing by the pool rim, bottles of the same unguent that had betrayed Jesus close to hand. Lilith traced wet circles on his chest with a fingertip. She was thinking of the image of the First and the Last, the son of man robed in purest white, his hair snow-white like Millius's bright hair, his eyes like flame, his voice like the sound of many waters.

"You know what would just make my millenium?" she inquired. He raised a lazy eyebrow.

"What's that?" he asked, walking his fingers up the curve of her shoulder. She smiled sinfully, the same heartbreaking smile that had brought thousands of souls to his fiery fold.

"I want to see just what Heaven's going through right now," she told him. "I want to watch those priggy little angels squirm."

"Oh, my darling," he said. "That would be cruel....."

He snapped his fingers. A servant appeared. "Get me a video feed of the Heavenly Forum," he ordered. Lilith looked up in surprise.

"I didn't know we could do that," she said. He kissed her.

"With satellites you can do one hell of a lot. We got the technology years ago, and we've used it every now and then when things get hairy. Ah, here we are."

The huge screens that made up one wall flickered and registered an image of blurry whiteness. "Focus," Samael ordered. The feed clarified. "Audio gain." Sound came through.

Lilith left off her circle-tracing and lay back in his arms. "Life don't get no sweeter than this," she said, as the form of Uriel staggered past the hidden camera, groaning. Together the Lord of Hell and the temptress lay in decadence and enjoyed the pain of their adversaries. And the best of the world's winecellars; Hell has agents everywhere.

Millius stood in a darkened office, a green-shaded banker's lamp providing just enough illumination for her to make out the features of one of her favorite demons. The glowing tip of a cigarette described circles in the heavy air.

"I hate to say this," Harlach said, meditatively, "but I have no idea who's behind this. I haven't heard from either side in recent weeks."

Harlach was a relatively minor demon: no one comparable to, say, Ozymandias; but he was stationed on the prime material plane, in daily contact with the mortal world. He was a businessman of sorts, and ineffably rich. And she liked him.

"No one seems to know anything about it, including the heavenly host. They haven't even put forward a statement saying it's all part of God's Greater Plan. That in itself makes me believe they're worried."

"It certainly does," said Harlach. "Oh, well. Coffee?"

"Thank you," she said, and meant it. The strain of seeing Morpheus again was telling on her. She sat down opposite him, in the slightly smaller and less ostentatious leather chair that faced his own. "How are you, Harlach?"

"Not bad," he said. "Last week was awful, but it seems to have reversed itself now."

"You can expect another such week," she said mildly, "and then a return to where we are now, and so on, as it reaches equilibrium. I'm trying to find out if this particular cosmic event is a forerunner for something worse."

"You think the powers that be are getting bored, and beginning to play around with our world and its surroundings?"

"Something like that." She leaned back in the chair, letting go of her tension, a little at a time, and changed the subject. "So tell me. What have you been up to? I haven't seen you in a couple of decades."

He followed her mercurial shift. He knew her. "Nothing much. I've had my fingers in a number of pies, but nothing you'd really recognize as my work. Another mega-shopping-mall in what used to be nice country. CD plastic wrappings. -You never wondered how they got that plastic on so tight? That's demonic influence for you. And of course the road widening all along the M1 orbital. I was commended for the road widening."

"Yeah, I know a lot of people whose lives that's made just a little bit harder," she said impartially. She herself was immune to the workings of both angels and demons, and she was able to view each as merely the labor they were designed to do, without being personally involved.

"Oh, I almost forgot. Gallur and I worked together to get the 24-hour televangelism channel up and running, and we managed to insert a little something into it that makes all the other channels just a little fuzzy, enough to annoy, not enough to get your TV fixed for."

"So the only clear channel is Benny Hinn and his dancing cripples?" she said, in admiration. "My dear Harlach, that is absolutely evil."

"Yes, isn't it? I was very proud of that one."

He lit another cigarette from the butt of the first one, and drew little wiggly sigils on the air with the glowing tip. "I've missed you," he said suddenly. "Millius, you look tired. What have you been doing to yourself?"

"Nothing," she assured him. "I went to see Morpheus."

"Oh," he said, and there was a lot more in the monosyllable than there normally was. "I see. Are you all right?"

"I think so," she said. "He looked so ill..."

Harlach looked at her, hard, saw the sharp worry lines in her face. "Ill? Millius, what's going on?"

"I wish I knew. He's been dumped, that's obvious, but there's something else. Something's draining his power, and his kingdom's power. I have to find out what it is."

"I see," Harlach said again. "But you have to realize that you're no good to him, or to yourself, if you run yourself ragged."

"Babe, that line's been used before," she said, but smiled in spite of herself. "I know, I know; it's just that every time I see him, especially looking sick, like he was, something in me just closes....like a fist, right here....and I can't think of thinking of anything else."

"The chicken-soup reflex," Harlach said to himself. She looked up, raised an eyebrow.

"Who?"

"Well-known fact. One way to a woman's heart is through her nurse's instinct. All you have to do in order to have the lady melt for you is to look ill or vulnerable, and they immediately turn into ministering-angels. Poor Morpheus. If he only knew what he was missing."

"'Chicken soup'?"

"Umbrella term for all things ministering-angel. You know, the hand-fluffed pillows, the mopping of the fevered brow, etcetera."

She laughed in spite of herself. Harlach always kept a straight face while saying the most outrageous things; it added to his charm. "The annoying part is that you're right," she told him. "I do just want to take care of him. It's so.....organic."

"Mmmm," Harlach agreed, "organic things tend to be messy and complicated. But you and me exist in a material world."

"'And I am a material girl'?"

"Something like that, yes. At least you look like a carbon-based life form. What do you really look like, Millius?"

"You don't want to know."

"Does it involve wings?"

"No, I don't have those, although I could," and she thought about that, feeling the black coat split over her shoulders as great colorless wings unfolded in the gloom of Harlach's office. "No, it's more like an omnipresent aspect of human existence. It hurts the eye."

"No kidding." He leaned back, steepled his fingers. "Go on. I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

"You really want to see?"

"Really."

Millius shrugged, her wings rustling, and disappeared.

Where she had been, there was something just on the edge of vision, like the flash of movement in the very corner of peripheral sight, or the sudden brightness of a star you're not looking directly at. It was vaguely human-shaped, a figure out of dream, out of stories. It was something you had always seen and did not remark: but looking directly at it made the back of the eye hurt, sharply. The figure put its head on one side and said, in a voice like the voices heard in moaning wind, or the groan of water in wells, Satisfied?

Harlach blinked, kept his eyes closed. "Impressive," he said. His voice shook, ever so slightly. When he opened his eyes again, Millius stood there, now wingless, looking contrite.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but you did insist. I warned you."

"No, it's all right. Thank you," he said. "I'm....honored."

"Don't be." She looked down, for all the world a woman in her twenties, lovely, with indescribable snow-white hair. "You said you'd show me yours?"

"Um. Yes....hold on a second," he said, marshalling his thoughts into some facsimile of coherence. Then he closed his eyes, and shimmered.

Now, instead of a handsome dark-haired man, she saw a beautiful, androgynous being, with colorless curling hair and blank pupilless eyes. It looked like an angel, except for one thing: where the eyes of angels are blank and colorless like ice, the eyes of demons burn red, like ruby cabochons. The crimson eyes were the only note of color in Harlach's face. Its wings curved around it in beautiful french curves, the feathers perfectly in place.

Harlach raised one lovely eyebrow, took a drag on its cigarette. "You look....surprised," it said, and its voice had risen almost an octave from the one Harlach affected in its human shape.

"You remind me vaguely of Desire," she told it. "I can't decide whether to think of you as he or she or it."

Harlach shimmered again, becoming the dark-haired man, an amused smile on his lips. His human face was handsome rather than beautiful: a face you could live with rather than worship. "Better?" he said.

"Much. I've grown so used to humanity that inhumanity disturbs me," she told him.

"You've gone native, darling," he told her. "Not that I'm much better, mind you. I drive a car with a telephone in it. In fact, I carry one around with me."

"A car or a telephone?"

"The phone. Look, isn't it amazing?" He produced a Nokia handset, turned it on. She noticed that the batteries were dead, as evidenced by the little flashing red light, had been dead for some time.

"Amazing," she repeated, laughing a little. He looked up at her.

"What?"

"Nothing. Nothing," she said, laughing harder. Harlach shrugged, put away the phone, watched her giggling uncontrollably. "I bet you don't buy petrol for your car, either, right?"

"Petrol?"

Now she was really laughing, deep mirth that erased some of the lines on her face, some of the past days. Harlach shook his head, thinking he would never understand the storyteller; but he didn't much mind.

Somewhere before the world began and after it ended, the celestial amphitheater is hushed, watching and waiting. In the center of the bright cold stage, the globe turns, bounded to the north by heaven and the south by hell, surrounded like Saturn with the rings of Purgatory. There is no sound apart from the slight creaking the world makes as it turns on its axis.

Millius materialized in the middle of the Roman Forum, dressed in a simple white stola; heads turned, before she tweaked certain threads of reality and became nondescript. She hurried over to a pair of lictors who were lounging against a column and waiting for their senator to return from his private meeting.

"Have you seen an old man wandering around here in strange clothes? Long beard, heavy cloak, dark cap?"

"Yur," said a lictor. "See a lot of them."

"I don't mean a normal garden-variety lunatic; this man would have been wearing clothes of a type never seen before around here. Oh, never mind. I'll try Greece."

"Wait, miss," the other lictor said, "I saw someone like that. Coming out of that caupona. Er."

"Where was he going?"

"Up that way towards the Temple of Jupiter."

"Thank you," she said, and looked at him carefully. Then she was gone, and the two lictors could not for the life of them remember who they had just been talking to, or about what.

"Found you," she said triumphantly several hours later after having traced Nostradamus through several times and empires. He was standing on the battlements of a fortress on the coast of Portugal. "What are you doing here?"

"I might ask you the same question, Millia Ambrosia Merlinus. But I'm in an expansive mood," he said. "I'm trying to find out if this has ever happened before. This imbalance."

"I could have told you it hasn't," she said. "I have after all been alive longer than this world."

"Ah, but not longer than the universe," he said. "Your father and I had a long talk about this once. We agreed that the living world retains marks of all the changes that the universe has undergone throughout the world's development. Like age rings on trees."

"And you're trying to find them?"

"I am." He turned to the ocean again, looking out over the sunset-gilded water.

"You do realize that by doing this through dreams you're jeopardizing the strength and health of the entire Dream Kingdom?"

"No," he said after a while. "I hadn't realized. Is he...."

"He's all right. Exhausted and depressed because his latest has dumped him, and I don't think he's traced the drain on his powers. But I'd find another way, if I were you."

"For me there is no other way. Unless...."

She did not like the sound of that 'Unless'.

"Unless I help you. Right?"

"As always, my lady, your intuition rivals my own. Yes. If you help me....take me from here to there through stories instead of dreams.....I have a better chance of understanding this mess. Will you?"

"What can I say." She turned away. Morpheus's white face rose before her, the wordless exhaustion in his eyes speared through her. "Where do we start?"

At long last Gabriel was giving up and going home. Even he had not been able to motivate the guardian angels to do much perimeter-guarding. Haliel was long gone, and even Susie was looking green when he picked up his briefcase and left his office. "Hold all my calls," he told her, on his way out.

The Forum was deserted. He sat down on a pearl chair to collect the wandering edges of his consciousness. He hadn't felt this ill in many millenia. He watched miserably as another angel lurched across the far side of the great square, hands firmly over mouth.

Gabriel made it home before he collapsed. Just. He had vomited several times on the way, and the edges of the world kept graying out. He was perhaps lucky that there was no one else on the chrysocolla road, because he couldn't seem to keep the Mercedes on the right side of it.

Riley drifted in a red mist, only half-aware of the pain in his chest; there were more frightening things than pain. Figures surrounded him, people he had known, people he had hurt or disappointed or let down or embarrassed or in some way demeaned. They leered at him, bringing up again all the little bad things he had done in his life and magnifying them, over and over; he saw near-misses, mistakes, poor judgment, everything in a haze of self-loathing. He writhed in agony, unable to move, unable to curl up in a tight ball and sink inside himself and stop hearing the soft little accusations, made all too harsh by their accuracy. Something inside him snapped, and he suddenly knew on whom to call for help. There was a woman.... a dark-haired woman, fine-featured, slender, who had helped him once before. Oh God, he thought. Have I sunk so low that I have to scream for help to someone I've only seen once, half-dreaming? Where am I? Where am I? Please....

The doctor frowned at him. She glanced at the readouts, adjusted a drip feed. "He should be responding to the antibiotic," she muttered. "Nurse?"

"Yes?" the nurse answered without looking up from her charts.

"Has he been delirious for long?"

"About two hours, I'd say. We got him on antideliriants when the resident made the diagnosis."

"Huh. Well, he looks like he's going to take a long time to come out of this one. Does he have any next-of-kin to speak of?

"Not really. Mother and father deceased, no siblings. He had a sister but she seems to have skipped the country. He's basically alone in the world."

"Poor Inspector Riley. Right. I'm on call, I'll probably be back before the night is over. Just....keep an eye on him, would you?"

Sarah! Riley called. Sarah, please, please help me.....

Sarah lay writhing in indescribable pain on the floor of Tamar's house. She fell through layers and layers of red agony, fighting with the memory of people she had known. The worlds changed, and she was shooting up with an old friend in a house on Water Street, only the H was stronger than she had ever known, and oh God, Colin, Colin, it's not cut, where did you get this shit....Colin? Colin? Oh God no.....oh....oh...ohhhhhhh God, God....

And afterwards in the detox clinic, the terrible wracking pain that went on and on and seemed to gather her up in a huge hand and wring her out, like a wet towel, and the sickness that would not let her go....

She fled through dark halls. Somewhere she heard the clocks strike midnight. Another story. Another way to explain what was happening to her body....

I looked down at Sarah's pain, and shuddered. "You tend to forget this part," I said to the world in general. "It's not something you want to remember."

Alex put his hand on my shoulder. "It's not your fault, love," he said.

"I know. It's just...."

"It's unpleasant. Here. Hold a baby. That's much more enjoyable." He handed Mary to me, and I was captivated as he had been by the tiny perfection of her; how small she was, that fingers the size of my pinky nail could have fingerprints.

Samael was enjoying himself hugely. He and the Lady Lilith had transferred the video feed of Heaven to Dis-wide TV. He sat in his throne room and watched the minions of heaven suffer, and knew that all his demons who were off duty, and many who were on, were watching with him. It gave him a lovely warm sense of togetherness.

Lilith wandered in, wearing only Lady Godiva hair and a few millions' worth of diamonds. He reached out and pulled her to him, inhaling the fragrance that had won countless souls over to his side. "My love, I believe our approval ratings are going through the roof," he said, and kissed her with ineffable skill.

"You're amazing," she said, at length. "He would never have thought of anything like this."

"And I'm not done yet," he said gleefully. Waving a hand towards the consoles that controlled the link between Heaven and Hell, he activated another function, one she hadn't seen before. On the screens, something was happening.

Lilith frowned. Black dots were moving over the screens, crawling over the pearly architecture of Heaven. Black dots with legs. And...

"Geese?" she queried. "Canada geese? Why are you infesting Heaven with cockroaches and geese and....Oh no. You can't be serious." She giggled in spite of herself. "That's disgusting. What are slugs going to eat in Heaven?"

"Decorative shrubbery," he said straight-faced. "And ornamental lawns. They'll have to contend with the geese for the lawns, of course."

On the screens large pale-grey slimy slugs oozed over the sapphire battlements, smearing the perfection of the stone. Geese wandered around, relieving themselves indiscriminately on any and all clean white surfaces. The roaches had already disappeared, to make themselves known in the food and in the personal living space of all the angels living in downtown Heaven.

"My love," Lilith said, laughing openly now, "you are more beautiful than the morning, cleverer than the trickster gods of all the world's civilizations combined, and nastier than a spoiled four-year-old with the power of nuclear destruction at his fingertips," and she kissed him with far more skill than he himself had displayed earlier. Then he kissed her, and then she removed her diamonds, because they were cold and sharp, and took them both through a wormhole to where a large and inviting waterbed awaited her pleasure.

Millius brought Nostradamus to a nondescript sandy plain in the middle of nowhere. It was the setting for a number of early hominid dreams and consequent stories, and it was Nostradamus's next destination through Morpheus's realm; but she had brought him here through her own domain. She sat down on a convenient rock and waited for the old man to complete his examination.

"Fascinating," he said, not unlike Mr. Spock. "The rings in this area are....rippled, almost. Bent. I don't understand it. It's as if there was some kind of unbelievably strong disturbance in this part of the spacetime continuum....only it went on for almost two thousand years."

When was it that the Antichrist was supposed to be set free? she wondered. No, not the Antichrist, anyway; the old Samael, king of the demons, locked in the bottomless pit for one thousand years, and then set free.

Set free. She laughed bitterly at that, as if Samael could ever, ever be imprisoned. He was free to move in and out of the mortal realm as he chose, of course. It wasn't possible to keep the Adversary locked up.

But for reasons entirely his own, he had waited there in the negligible dark of the prison, waited with only his coruscating thoughts and the company of his most inward of personalities for amusement. Waited, until they let him out.

And then he brought the world down around their ears.

They didn't notice it at first, so subtle was his program, so capable and ruthless and engineered was his plan; but in the hundreds of years since the key to the bottomless pit had first been turned, his minions had continued to eliminate resistance to him in the mortal world. Little by little the underpinnings of true faith were eroded, as the world whirled through the long halls of eternity; and when at last Lucifer was set free upon that world, he simply touched it with a fingertip, and it collapsed.

Ever since, Heaven had been fighting back through televangelism in the later years and propaganda and sacrifices in the earlier ones. Ever since the battle had been a defensive and not an offensive one, as Lucifer's people slowly gained the upper hand.

Most mortals didn't even realize that anything had changed.

She remembered the woman with the crown of stars, that day that Lucifer was hurled into the bottomless pit; the woman standing on the moon, screaming in the agony of labor. Something of her own face was reflected in the symmetry of the woman's features; she knew that she would never bring forth a child, and was glad, and wretched with misery at the same time. The story she told did not relate what happened to the woman after the thousand two hundred and sixty days were done; sometimes she wondered. God told her what to say in her stories. That was before she had discovered the wonders of autonomy.

She tucked her hair behind her ears and watched as Nostradamus followed some invisible line along underneath the ground, looking not unlike a hypnotized chicken. She felt suddenly very old and cynical and unimaginative.

"What are you looking for?"

"Something to explain this ripple effect."

"How about a great big meteorite just brimming with metaphysical energy," she suggested sardonically, "or God sticking his finger in the ground and swizzling it up a bit. Look, can we move on?"

"Wait wait wait," Nostradamus said, "wasn't this around the time when Lucifer was locked up?"

"I was thinking of that," she said. "It's around that time. But wouldn't there be an even bigger one a thousand years later?"

"Possibly. If that's the explanation I'm not sure how it's of use to us," he thought out loud. She sighed and lay back on the ground, watching the ancient clouds swirl over her like the colors in delirium.

The night is a different color in Italy. Over Florence it takes on a rich velvet blue tone; in the north, towards Milan and the border-crossing lakes, it is blacker than the inside of your eye; and down close to Venice beneath the clouds of old stories that hang and cluster there, it is violet; the color of Grecian waters.

Streets seem full of night. Instead of forming a ceiling spangled with stars, the night drifts down into the tiny cobbled thoroughfares and fills them up to the very brim, so that travellers inhale the night as they pass by. It is bitter as ashes in the back of the throat; it tastes like age.

Coldly, as in dreams, the faceless people pass by. They wear long pale robes of fabric never seen before upon earth. Their heads are horned; their backs are winged. Their hands are long and thin and pale.

A church opens its doors. Greenish light floods from within, and more faceless people drift out on a tide of organ music. It is chucking-out time in the realm of nightmare. Familiar figures flash in and out of vision, faces seen once and never forgotten, old lovers, old loathers, old pursuers and pursued; they open their silent mouths and cry out to the dreamers who come by, Forsaken! Forsaken! Forsaken!

Morpheus looks at his hands as if surprised at their work, and turns away, out of the Shifting Zones and the shores of dream. Matthew the raven swirls awkwardly out of nowhere and perches on his shoulder, shuffling his gleaming wings.

"Nice work, boss," the raven offers. "I like the church. Very Gothic."

"Matthew," Morpheus says expressionlessly, "isn't there something you ought to be doing?"

"Er," the raven says. "Probably. Yes. Sorry, boss." He lifts off again, and flaps away. Often this is the case: the Lord of Dreams is not a sociable master.

Alone again in the darkness of his empty realm, the Dream King stands, hands at his sides, and looks around at the worlds he has created for the witch; a string of them, a strand of pearls, stretching off into the blackness of the void like glittering toys.

Toys, he thought suddenly, toys is what they are. The witch was gone. The witch was not coming back. He remained forsaken.

Quietly, he sent out a cold command to the perfect little worlds, one after another. Brilliantly the worlds shimmered, responding to his words, and dissolved, shattering, glistening in the void as the fragments fell. Fragments that had once been the height of shivering beauty were dust in the blackness of the ancient interworld dark.

He watches as they fall and shiver and dissolve and become like hearts'-dust, unidentifiable, nothing like stars; cloudy in the night. He watches, and he turns away, and his shoulders are so thin it seems you can see the remaining stars through his body.

Sarah lay quiescent on my floorboards, at peace, silent, her body perfect and pale and untouched by the ravages of disease.

She resembled, I thought, nothing so much as a china doll. David Bowie came unbidden into my head: I feel a wreck without my little china girl....I cannot live without my little china girl...I feel her heart beating loud as thunder....But her heart beat softly, sadly, slowly, tasting adulterated and ancient blood, a mixture more heady and more solemn than anything her veins had ever carried before. Her chest did not rise or fall: she lay like the rich dead, faintly blue-tinged in the depths of the shadows over throat, breast, arm. Her eyelids were almost translucent.

Her black, black hair was beginning to grow. Already the nails and the hair of her dead body had begun to grow. As the change perfected itself the rate of growth would slow, but continue. My own hair grows about a foot a day, but that is only because I wish it to.

Sarah's china face trembled: her long, long lashes fluttered and parted. Her eyes, which before had been a deep Athena-grey, had become startlingly blue: lapis-lazuli blue, inlaid with turquoise and sapphire, bubbling with the purplish-blue of iolite. They had the strange flat hypnotic quality of vampire eyes. She gazed up straight above her: then those amazing eyes slid into focus, and found me.

"Now look, " I said, "with your vampire eyes," and I laughed to think of another golden-haired man, beautiful beyond belief, kneeling over a newborn vampire in a Southern graveyard, hung with cypress and swirled with fog.

"You're not Lestat," she said, and her voice was low and rough and sweeter than I had imagined any voice could be. For a moment horror struck cold through me and I thought What have I made? What kind of Lilith, Ishtar, Inanna have I wrought upon this world?

But the moment passed and she laughed; and her laugh was her old wry laugh, and I smiled sharply. "No, but I think he's pretty damn hot," I said.

She sat up. Staring at her hands, she flexed the long pale fingers, as if she had never seen them before. "Everything's....different," she said. "More intense. It's like really good speed, or LSD."

"Only this doesn't debilitate you at all.....by the way, my beautiful new one, you're completely free from all vestiges of disease. Any physical imperfections are gone. You are the ideal of cold and ravishing beauty.

"Are you ready to explore the new and more beautiful world?"

Alex sauntered in, blond hair slipping down his shoulders like rain, Mary in his arms. "Sleeping Beauty awakes," he murmured, "and what a beauty...Sarah, welcome to a whole new universe. Only whether it's ready for you or not...."

Mary reached out her little arms towards her mother. Alex deposited the baby in Sarah's lap, not without some reluctance. Sarah looked up at me suddenly with a kind of fear on her china face, and her whole body was stiff and unmoving.

"Can I....I mean, is it possible for me to..."

"Breast feed?" I finished. "Yes. Only you'll stop lactating in a few days and she'll need either a wet-nurse or a formula regimen. For now, your milk is still healthy; still warm."

Riley remained unconscious, although he no longer cried out from the pain and the fright of the things in his head. Sarah was out of his mind: he had given up on her help. The doctor and the nurses had run through all the antipyretics and antideliriants they could think of: had done all the tests for all the possible underlying causes they could imagine: but he was not responding. He sank, hour by hour, farther away from the surface.

Harlach drove too fast along the M25 orbital, his vintage Corvette Stingray shrieking in protest as he lurched round a curve. He swore under his breath and stroked the steering wheel in remorse. "Sorry, love," he told the Stingray. "I'm a little preoccupied."

"No kidding," said the car, "why don't you let me drive?"

"Because I haven't thought of it," Harlach said, relinquishing the wheel. "Past Milton Keynes, and north towards the Dales. I have...business there."

The Stingray, whose name was Jaela, knew Harlach well enough to keep silent. She turned on her dash radar detector and slid up to a hundred and five, riding easily, her huge engine hardly laboring as she raced through the night.

Harlach, fingers to his temples, lay back in the leather seat and tried to ignore his headache. His control had slipped sufficiently so that his brilliant red eyes, although still resembling normal human eyes, were beginning to glow faintly red in the dark.

He was worried. Harlach was not easily worried: being a demon, he had to juggle the responsibility of upholding Hell's reputation and keeping up appearances in the mortal world. Few things fazed Harlach: but he was worried about Millius, and about her unrequited love. Few people could imagine what it must be to love and be unloved for over four billion years; and Millius, for all her hard exterior, was vulnerable. He had been more accurate than he knew when he had spoken of the chicken-soup reflex: he felt protective towards her. He was not exactly in love with her: he just felt as if he ought to protect her from anything that would damage her in any way.

He sighed. Jaela felt his shoulders tense, and she started redirecting the cabin heat to the driver's seat; there was little she could do for him, but she felt his pain, and she wanted to help.

The world slid by in the light-dark staccato of the highway, and Harlach found himself able, at last, to sleep.

Samael, in snowy robe and platinum chains of office, sat behind his great blackwood desk and administrated. Ahriman sat on the corner of the desk in ineffable and Achaemenidian splendor and stamped petitions with a red stamp that glowed faintly in the pale light of Samael's office.

"Monthly wages of sin......approved; admittance to Lake Avernus spa for occupational hazard treatment....approved; gin allowance.....denied..."

"Ahriman, tell me something," Samael said conversationally. "You were master of dark in the Persian empires. What was Alexander the Great really like?"

"Short," said Ahriman shortly. "Beautiful, but short. Golden hair, mutable eyes, compact and admirable physique. He wore armor well."

"Hmmm," said the Devil. He signed another document with a flourish, effectively cutting off that line of conversation.

Ahriman raised an eyebrow but said nothing for some time, until after Samael yawned hugely and flexed the snowy wings he was affecting. "Where's Lilith?" he ventured.

"Mesopotamia, I believe," Samael said, his back still arched. "Why?"

"Just wondering. I haven't seen her for some time."

"Mmm. She did the Woman from Ostrava Petrkovice deal last week and now they've got her doing an Aspect for Ishtar. Clay, this time. Those archaeologists and anthropologists are so easily obsessible."

"As always, I am amazed by your ingenuity," Ahriman said dryly. 'What's next?"

"Um. We've got a few more Barney episodes to write," Samael began, "perhaps Beelzebub might take control of that for the moment, I'm feeling disenchanted with the whole idiom. The Satanists requested audience at eleven thirty, I've got a meeting with my architects at twelve and another with the accounting team at one. Oh, and the concept team has come up with a new idea for a sitcom that they want to show me at some point. I'm thinking of ordering Chinese."

Ahriman smiled mirthlessly. "I'll go tell Beelzebub he's it."

"You do that," Samael said absently. "Oh, bleeding heaven."

"What?"

"I forgot. I need to poll the electorate. Could you send someone down to the Free Man sometime today and ask what the general impression of my administration is? I need to scatter some largesse here and there."

"I'll go," Ahriman volunteered. "My afternoon is free."

"Would you?" the Devil said pleadingly. "And Mammon is driving everyone nuts in Infrastructure. You couldn't find it in your heart to let him tag along and let the Infrastructure boys have an afternoon off?"

Ahriman sighed. "I suppose so. Is this worth brownie points?"

"Big time."

"Fine, fine. Let me just go tell Beelzebub, and then I'll come back and finish this," he said, indicating the sheaf of paperwork to be done. Samael bestowed a glowing smile on him.

"Thank you," he said, and meant it.

Gabriel was beginning, very slowly, to feel better. He lay in semidarkness, his Second Empire bed unmade, the curtains drawn, the floor littered with mugs and tissues. One beautiful hand lay over his eyes; the other clutched a handful of bedclothes. It was midmorning, and while normally Gabriel was at his office and being industrious by this time, he had just woken up.

He rolled over, stifling a moan. How long had he been lying here? The last thing he remembered with any kind of clarity was making his tortuous way from the Mercedes to the bed, after the unpleasant and rather difficult drive from the office, and collapsing.

Heaven. Oh God, Heaven. How long had Heaven been without its chief administrator?

He sat up, then rather wished he hadn't, and fell back into his damp cocoon of pillows. The fleeting thought crossed his mind that he wished he had a lover to take care of him; someone else to pick up his tissues and bring him his holistic medicines and tell him it was going to be all right. Then the reasoning sector of his mind took over, and he closed his eyes again in embarrassment that he had ever thought such a thing.

Two hours later he was wrapped in a dressing gown and vertical, which were two major improvements in his condition. He picked up the cordless in the kitchen and dialed his office.

Five rings. Six. Then his answering machine picked up, in Susie's voice.

"Thank you for calling Heaven Inc., Gabriel's office. No one is available to take your call right now but please leave your name, number and a short message at the tone and we will return your call as soon as possible. Thank you."

"Damn," said Gabriel, in a very pious tone.

I paced, irritably. Sarah and Mary were engaged in their biblical occupation, Alex was making suggestive eyes at me, and all I could think of was the red hair of my only sister, whose face had risen before me while I sat and watched Sarah writhe in agony. Jall, whom I hadn't seen for almost a year.

I hadn't exactly dreamed of her since that night when I went to see Ishtar; but I had had her on my mind recently, ever since that night, and there was a sense in my consciousness that all was not right with the world.

Too much had gone by since I had spoken to her. I shook the thought of her blood-colored hair from my vision and turned back to Sarah. She was closing her dress back over her breasts.

"Tamar," she said. "I....Someone's calling for me. I have to go downtown."

"Where downtown?"

"The hospital."

I told her how she could move. In the drawing room of my ancient Victorian house it was somehow fitting to see her shimmer and dissolve into mist, and coalesce instead into the tiny fluttering form of a bat, brown-furred and leathery, and swirl out of the window.

Alex came up behind me and put his hands around my waist. "What is it, love?"

"I don't know," I told him, truthfully. "I think something might be up with my sister."

Sarah winged her way through the night on sails made of the webbing between her magnified and elongated fingerjoints, watching the night unfold around her in the colors of her own eardrums. The world was a model under the flashing light of a strobe, visible in snatches of sound, colorless and every color, indescribably beautiful. She circled down over the towers of the hospital she knew held Riley within its sterile grasp, shivered, and suddenly became Sarah again, her fingers shrinking, her body elongating, her mind flooding along familiar pathways like the first spring rain after a drought. It felt good to be bipedal, she thought dryly, walking to the roof stairway door and opening it. She didn't even feel the resistance of the lock as she broke the tempered steel with the force of her hand turning. She wore what she had worn at Tamar's, a long dark dress, nondescript, reddish black. Her hair was already growing; it was shoulderlength. With an effort she managed to keep the people she passed from noticing her as she went by; she could feel their minds, slightly, and slammed shields down all around herself from their curiosity. She knew where Riley lay with the same chilly knowledge that had prompted her to come here in the first place: he needed her, and he was here.

She pushed open a door. In the red-lit dark of a sleeping ICU room he lay ultimately still, and she felt a cold rush of panic flow through her veins; but the machines told her he lived, with their reassuring rhythmic lights, lines and beeps. She came to the bedside and looked down at the man who had hunted her.

His face was haggard, the flesh pulling taut over the bones; the nose and the cheekbones stood out like spars, the shadows were grey. His eyelids were almost translucent, and she could see the darkness of his eyes through their pallor. His mouth was a knife-cut, sharp, straight, bloodless.

"Oh, Riley," she murmured. "Is this my fault as well?"

Deep in the burning lands that trapped Riley, he heard her cool voice, like diamonds, like silver, dropping like rain on his upturned face. He felt the bands of hot iron around his chest begin to ease with the sweetness of the words, like rain-washed green apples, like the touch of cool hands.

"Riley," she said. "Riley, I will repay my debts. Never doubt that. You called to me, and I'm here.

"Riley. Come back. Please."

Cool hands. He felt her fingers on his, leading him out of the burning plain. Her voice, her touch, her presence, showed him the way. He came back to the world through layers of dark water, and finally his face broke the surface, and he could see her.

"Sarah?"

She found his eyes. "Riley. You called me."

"I didn't know you'd come."

"I had to," she told him. "I feel so responsible. I was the whore you agreed not to notice."

He nodded. He had known. "If it was that which made you ill...." she trailed off.

"Not specifically," he said. "I've seen you...what? three times? how is this your fault?"

"I know what you think of me."

Now his grey eyes narrowed. "Of you? No. Of your profession. You look rather respectable, actually."

"Oh, I've reformed," she told him bitterly. "I'm a good girl now."

"Glad to hear it," he said, and almost, almost cracked a smile.

Gabriel had progressed to the point of wearing clothes. He was still weak and shaky, but the dreadful enervation and nausea had disappeared. He was getting no answer from any of the Heaven Inc numbers, and he assumed the whole operation was down for the duration; he was annoyed, of course, but there was little he personally could do. He switched on his Mac laptop and checked on the cruise control programs that were keeping the ten crystal spheres in perfect circular orbit. There was a small error in the calculation for the fifth sphere, and he tut-tutted and altered the program to bypass that calculation; apart from that, the universe seemed to be progressing without any major setbacks. He turned on some Elgar and settled down to write a memo to all the major administrators about the importance of perfect circles. He was good at math, as he was good at everything, and he was aware that the circles would get more and more elliptical if they became imperfect, and then spheres would be crashing into one another, and chaos would ensue.

He noticed the AOL instant messager blinking at the bottom of his screen. Archaea wishes to send you a message, it told him.

Accept.

Archaea: Are you Gabriel? Because if you are, I'm interested in setting up a business deal with you.

His curiosity, such as it was, was piqued.

GBRL1: I am Gabriel. Proceed.

Archaea: I'm a vampire. But don't let that disturb you. I want to discuss the removal of another vampire from the world.

GBRL1: I don't believe we have any common ground.

He went to cut the connection, but the screen blinked again.

Archaea: Wait. This vampire. She's evil. She consorts with Lucifer. Please, I need angelic help to get rid of her. I want to redeem myself.

GBRL1: Redeem yourself? There are better ways than to destroy another.

Archaea: Even if that other is pure evil?

GBRL1: Destruction is never good.

He clicked the "Block User" button and went back to his memo, but the words remained in the back of his mind. Was it possible that a monster like the dracula could be redeemed?

Archaea grinned as the screen told her Heaven's chief administrator had hung up. She knew, being as old as she was, that angels are not easily drawn into conversation; but ideas stick in their pretty heads like nails, and it is difficult to remove them once introduced. Now that she had suggested it, she knew it would not be long before she heard from Gabriel.

She wondered vaguely how he was. She knew, of course, that Heaven's entire crew had been suffering for the past few days. She decided she didn't really care, and closed the lid of her computer with a sharp and angular smile.

Chasing the dragon was getting old. She lit the candle, crumpled the foil into a spoon, tipped the pile of white powder onto it, waited for it to fume, pulled her crystal straw from its silken wrappings, breathed deeply. She knew there were more ways of taking the stuff, but this way was time-honored, and she knew it worked. Flipping on a tape that was originally David Bowie but had been recorded over with her own Vivisepulture demo, she lay back in the chair. Bowie's low, tired, world-weary voice suddenly shifted, raced ahead, became someone else's voice entirely. Her own high and clear voice, over a driving bass beat, and the words were old in her mouth, and the room was made of silk and flame. She lay back in the chair and felt the beat of her own heart fill the room, louder than the drums, the bass, louder than everything. The world will go on, she thought; the spheres will turn, Tamar will come to me, and I will destroy her.

It is her destiny.

In Dis, Ahriman and Mammon walked along the curtain wall, wide as a thoroughfare, separating the fantastical and red-lit city from the outside chaos of the circle it sat in. Steps led down from the wall on both sides; red seas lapped alongside the wall on one side, worldly-wise demons hurried past on the other. Ahriman's long pale-golden hair floated in the heavy air of the Circles, like an aureole, like a halo.

"You look like you licked a Van de Graaff generator," said Mammon, sourly, in envious disgust. They made their way down the wall, slowly. Ahriman gave him a long cool look, and didn't bother to reply.

Mammon was beautiful as were all the other archdemons, those who had fallen from Heaven in that first glorious and terrible expulsion; but his beauty was somehow tarnished and made smaller with the stamp of individual appearance. His platinum curls were dingy; his physique, though admirably muscled and not without proportions of grace, was rather stocky and compact next to the admittedly ethereal Ahriman. He looked more like a Hephaistos than a Hermes, if one can imagine the same basic appearance stretched and altered to appear as Vulcan and as Mercury. He was eating an ice cream cone, and not doing a wonderfully neat job of it.

"Look," he said, gesturing stickily, "this is stupid. Why don't we just go back to the Tower and tell him we couldn't find anyone to ask?"

"Because he'd know," Ahriman told him. "He knows when we lie. He's the prince of lies."

Mammon sighed and sucked his fingers. "I know, I know, it's just that...."

"You don't want to be here," Ahriman finished smoothly. "Neither do I. But we're here."

They were. Turning down a winding ramp that made its way from the raised highway of the wall to the darkened maze of the streets below, they found a small and inconspicuous bar with a blank black sign that swung gently in the sticky air. The Free Man.

Inside, it was deadly quiet. Here in the center of the capital city of Hell, close to the eight great towers that stretched towards the red clear sky like a forest of silver columns, the pulse of Hell beat more strongly than anywhere else: here is the true center of the underworld's politics. Ahriman pushed open the door, and the silence thickened further.   
"Hello, nasty," said a voice from the darkness. An expression of pain flickered across Ahriman's lovely features.

"Dagon, my friend, if you must greet others with references to pop culture, please try to stay away from the Beastie Boys," he said mildly. "Look, we have a question."

"We?" said Dagon, dropping grapes into his mouth, indolently. Their red eyes had adjusted to the dark, and they could make out the forms of seven or eight demons lying on and around a number of silk-upholstered couches in a room that was reminiscent of an Enlightenment salon. Many of them were wearing wigs, all of them were smoking, and the general atmosphere of the place just reeked with intellectual brilliance. And smoke.

"Yes, we," said Ahriman, pouring himself a drink. "His Lordship wants to know: What is the general feeling towards the government of Hell at this time? You, of all demons, ought to know."

Dagon looked around the circle, lovely eyebrows raised. 'What do you think?" he inquired. Mammon was shuffling his feet in impatience. Ahriman looked at him, looked away.

"I'd say we're all marvellously happy," said a demon with long strawberry blond curls and Louis XIV indolence. "Especially since the swing back towards us. "

"Oh, yes. And rah rah for the Great Leader, don't you know," said another with a Eurotrash accent. "All my support, at least."

"He's doing his best. I must say we've not had half the uprisings that we had last year," said a demon in black Armani with red sunglasses and shimmery shoes. "He's certainly got Hell under his thumb."

Mammon lit a cigarette. "So it's generally positive, one way and another."

"I'd say so," Dagon confirmed. "Have a drink, Mammon. Haven't seen you lately."

"This isn't my scene," Mammon said, but found himself a glass and a bottle and plied them. Ahriman subsided onto a Louis Quatorze chair and watched the proceedings through half-closed eyes.

"What do you guys do all day?" Mammon inquired, gesturing with the cigarette.

"Do?" said the Armani demon, eyebrows raised. "This, mostly. We lie about and indulge our vices and propound theories of metaphysical discord."

"'We must avoid intellectualism that smells of intellectualism'," Ahriman quoted without opening his eyes.

"That was music, if you remember rightly," Dagon told him, "but then again, why? We are legitimately brilliant, and we're doing Hell nothing but good."

"I suppose you're right," Ahriman conceded, "only you're all so clever you make the rest of us feel stupid. Oh, Dagon, I meant to ask you. What occupational hazard did you incur that required you to spend a week at the Lake Avernus spa?"

"Brain fever, my dear Persian. The curse of academe."

Ahriman opened an eye. "Really? Then it must not have been dreadfully serious, since you were well enough to take advantage of Lilith's escort service all the four nights you were there."

"These things come and go," Dagon informed him, reclining on his couch with an air of put-upon weariness. Ahriman, in spite of himself, laughed.

"You had brain fever?" Mammon asked, enthralled.

"As you were, gentlemen," Ahriman hurried to interject, "we must be going. Thank you for your input on this most important of matters. Come on, Mammon, you can drink all you want when we get back."

Millius took Nostradamus back to the Pyramids, past Dahshoor to Tell el-Amarna, where Akhenaten's court had been built, down the Nile to Aswan, south into the Dark Continent, across to Madagascar and then back North into the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, Samarra and Jerusalem. Nostradamus spent a long time in the Mosque at Samarra, wandering around looking directly at the ground in an absentminded sort of way. Tourists looked at them curiously, until Millius tweaked a few threads of reality and made them look exactly like any other pair of tourists wandering around in the vast courtyard behind the qibla wall.

"Have you found anything at all," she inquired, after some time.

"Oh, yes," Nostradamus told her, "look, here, a piece of original tile, and here, a diamond that must've fallen out of someone's ring, and here, a ley-line, and here, another ley line that crosses the first, and...."

"Wonderful," she said, sourly, and sat down on the courtyard floor in a heap, and thought of Morpheus, and wished she hadn't.

She remembered the Scattering of Morpheus; the terrible blight that came down over all the Dreaming, the months Morpheus lay too ill to rise from his bed, as the kingdom decayed all around him, and Lucien and Nuala watched in bitter sorrow; remembered the part of her own soul she had left him with, as his own soul was destroyed by Dee, and how her being was compromised in every sense of the word as she slid the ring containing her soul on his thin finger and felt it slipping away, and was completely and utterly glad, that she mught help him in any way she could.

She remembered the cold feeling of the wind blowing through her bones as she hurried through darkening Paris to find Dee, and his yellow hate-jewel; felt the regeneration of her soul begin, itchy and hot and full of pain, and the pang of despised joy as she found Dee underneath a bridge in Dickensian London, and as her fingers touched the jewel. She looked down at her white hands, scarred ever so slightly by what looked like old burnmarks. The jewel was mostly dross, residue of anger and hate and solitude and madness, built like any crystal around seeds; in this case the seed was Dream's melancholy soul. She had had to melt away the fetid crystal to free the soul, and the hate had burned away her skin.

She closed her hands in involuntary reaction to the remembrance of pain. Dream's soul had been warm and heavy in her palm, precious, unbelievably precious, to be guarded beyond life. She remembered so clearly the euphoria she had felt when she knelt before him and held up his own soul for him to take from her fingers, and the incredible sense of loss she had known as he closed his white hand around it and took it away.

It hurt. It had never stopped hurting. She had not known what love could be apart from pain; she had only known pain, and nothing more than pain, when she thought of love. Because he did not love her. He never would. His needs were so different from what she could give.

She found herself back in the great courtyard at Samarra, hands clenched so tightly her nails had cut bloody half-moons in her palms.

Lilith strode through the hot and scented Mesopotamian night, her heels tapping on Babylon's golden streets. Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, she thought, and is become the habitation of devils.

The moon was rising. Yesterday had been fruitful, she reflected. Archaeologists were remarkably oversexed, if you encouraged them in the right way. She was tired of being clay, though, and she was out for a night on the proverbial town.

Regard Lilith for a moment. She is roughly seven feet tall, and her hair tonight is the color of plums, a rich, deep red-violet that sparks copper in the light of the noonday sun, but under moonlight appears silvered purple. Her eyes are cobalt blue and fringed with black lashes as thick and luxurious as velvet. She is wearing a dress wrought, not made, of Ottoman seraser, silver-gilt and cut like a knife; straight lines curved by the curves beneath them. Her legs flash through the side slits, elusive, mystifying, electric in their white luminosity, like the limbs of geisha wrapped and swathed in translucent silk. Her arms are white and round and alabaster-perfect, like the arms of She, in Kor; her long pale hands are elegant and tapered and tipped with perfect violet nails. Her face is indescribable. Men have tried, and failed, for more than six thousand years.

She thought about Samael as she walked, about his beauty and his power and his vulnerability; thought about the way he had looked as she last saw him, standing silently in his dressing gown, his back to her, at the great windows of Dis's eighth tower. He had frightened her during his illness, frightened her in a way she hadn't known she could still be frightened; and her love for him was stronger than it had ever been. That in itself scared her, since she thought of love as a loss of control. There was something about this new feeling that made her feel suddenly young and inexperienced. She needed something to take her mind off it.

And, suddenly, there that something was. Out of the shadow of a convenient narthex stepped the slender form of Millius, wearing what looked like an Armani jacket and a very short hairstyle. With her was another form, hunched and crabbed with age, but still recognizable.

"What are you doing here?" Lilith inquired. Nostradamus stepped forward, but Millius forestalled him.

"Looking for answers," she said. "And yourself?"

"On a business trip," Lilith said, and shimmered: her entire body went the white of alabaster, her seraser sheath became a tiered Babylonian skirt, her mighty breasts exposed in the paleness of the moon. Her eyes were the only note of color in her body, brilliant and arterial red; the rising crescent moon of Ishtar sat lambent on her brow. "Recognize me?"

"Oh yeah," Millius said. "That's your Gate, isn't it." She pointed to the dark bulk of the Ishtar Gate, colorless in the silver light, but swarming with tiled lions and supernatural forms. "Very nice."

"Thank you," Ishtar said, and became Lilith once more. "What answers have you found?"

"Not a whole lot," Millius admitted. "We're looking for twists in the leylines and the marks of power in the land, something to explain how all this balance shit got started. He was originally trying to do this through dreams..."

"I understand," Lilith said, quietly. "And what is your conclusion?"

"That there are no correlations between the mess the metaphysical universe is in and the mess the leylines are in," Nostradamus interjected. "I don't understand it."

Lilith thought hard about that, and then said, "Show me."

Haliel stood in the middle of the Heavenly Forum, facing the basilica, his back to the extremely high-class mall, and watched as herds of Canada geese wandered aimlessly around the once-snowy stones, vying with the grey slugs for pride of place. He had already discovered the cockroaches.

He sat down on a convenient Corinthian capital, first divesting it of its resident goose, and put his lovely head in his hands. He was feeling better than he had, which was a plus, but he couldn't help thinking that maybe some of this could have been averted. Had Gabriel listened...but no, he thought, that way blasphemy lies. All of this was ineffable, of course, part of a greater Divine Plan, as was everything; but had Haliel been a betting angel he would have put money on God's feeling as rotten as he himself had felt a few days before. And why would the Supreme Being put himself through that?

No, this was something entirely new. He looked down the acropolitan hill to the edge of Heaven, where far below he could see the ten spheres moving almost imperceptibly, making a noise like a wet fingertip on the rim of a wineglass. That noise was really, really getting on his nerves.

He stood up and made his way across the wide agora, walking over to the battlements of sapphire that separated the Forum from the reaches of interstellar space. There was no air in Heaven, not that it mattered; no one there was mortal or alive in any real sense of the word. It gave the light a different, clearer timbre. Haliel looked down through the reaches of space to the spheres, turning below him with Christmas-tree and Aristotelian grace.

Angels' eyes can be luminous and beautiful and enthralling, or flat and crystal-cabochon-like, revealing nothing. They also have infinite depth of focus and can see through certain materials. Haliel watched as far, far below within the confines of ten crystal shells, far beyond the sun, moon and stars, the little jewel of Earth hung; and on it, on a small island, on a road on a small island, a black car roared like a sleek and aerodynamic version of a hellhound.

Harlach dreamed. Demons don't dream unless they make an effort: Harlach had lived long enough on the mortal plane so that he understood what he had been missing. He dreamed he lay in a great bed hung in crimson and flame-colored silk, in a palace built for a king of kings far beyond the rising sun, and that the world was at his doorstep, and Millius stood by his bed with an expression of sharp and bittersweet sorrow on her lovely face, and Dream's ruby like a lump of hatred swung from a chain in her clenched fist.

But Millius was speaking to him, and as he strained to hear her voice Jaela's great tires found an imperfection in the roadsurface, and he jolted to wakefulness.

"Sorry," said the Stingray, guiltily. "Didn't see that."

"It's all right," Harlach said, hand over his eyes. "Where are we?"

"Just passed Bakewell. Look, where is our ultimate destination?"

"The redstone edges. Hen Cloud."

"What the blazes are you doing at Hen Cloud?"

"Communing with witches," he told her, subsiding again into the seat. Jaela shrugged mentally, flipping on her radio and picking Mozart out of the air. Harlach's mouth gave the impression of a smile, for a moment.

Around them the night was purple and revealed nothing of the landscape through which they were passing. By day, these hills would be giants' bones draped in green and purple velvet patchwork, alive with the glory of heather and gorse, sheep-scattered, cloud-shadowed, possessed of an almost preternatural beauty. As it was, they were brooding and uncommunicative shapes. Jaela knew the area well, and although she was glad of the night for Harlach's headache, she missed the beauty of the countryside, living mostly in the environs of London. She sped onward through the night, left the highway behind, roared through tight bends and hurtled along straights in the maze of back roads that wound along these hills and valleys. At length she turned down a tiny lane and slid herself neatly into the gap in the hedge that almost all the cars on the road missed.

"We're here," she told Harlach. He blinked, opened his eyes.

"Thanks," he said, and meant it. He got out and hurried up the hill in the night. It was moonless, black and textured like velvet, but his eyes were not limited to what humans could see, and he climbed over the redstone boulders with no difficulty at all. Atop the edge, where the layers of red sandstone jutted out at an angle from the surrounding earth, he found what he was looking for.

He thought hard. The air around him became for a moment a different color, and faded again; when he opened his eyes they were clear and grey-green. "By the seven swords of Weland," he said tiredly, "I summon thee," and knelt down, tapped peremptorily on a flat stone carved very faintly with something that might have been a rune, a drawing of a figure, or something else entirely. The darkness became less around him, and there was the intimation of someone standing before him on the hilltop. Faintly luminous eyes blinked.

"Yes?"

"I need a favor," Harlach said simply. "Can you tell me someone's future?"

"Whose?" said the voice, which was old, if overlaid with a well-educated accent.

"The storyteller's."

The figure was silent. He had the feeling that it was studying him.

"Well?"

"Do you have the slightest idea of what you ask?" it inquired.

"I think so."

"You're not meant to know," it said. "She is a creature of God. At least she was."

"So was I, if you remember," Harlach told it.

"Touche. But you're a demon. She's something else entirely."

"All right," said Harlach, "what if I ask a specific question?"

"What question?"

"Will she survive her love for the Lord of Dreams?"

"Survive?"

"I think you know what I mean."

"Her body will survive, of course," said the voice. "She has no real soul anymore. It is fracted and corroborate since she destroyed part of it in the hope of saving Morpheus.

"If that is what you mean, then her love has already condemned her," it told Harlach.

"No," Harlach said. "No. Give me something more."

"What more do you want? The storyteller's being is flawed. It always was. She was created flawed, in a kind of experiment. God wanted to see what would happen. And that fatal flaw is what's given her the capacity to love, and to be obsessed, but does not allow her the human capacity to forget. She is a tragic error."

"Forever?"

"For what passes for ever these days," the voice said, shivering slightly, as if disturbed. "Things are changing."

"And what is the ultimate verdict?" Harlach asked, feeling suddenly very tired and very frightened.

"I can't see," it said, and now it sounded definitely scared. "I can't see anything at all. It's like there's a wall between me and the worlds."

Harlach walked slowly back down the hill, disturbed. Jaela's great headlamps blinked open as he approached, unlit. "Home, James," he told her, and slung himself inside, giving away nothing.

I put on a trenchcoat and walked outside into the rain. Alex remained at the high curved window: he had wanted to come, but I asked him not to. He waited for me, as he would wait for me to come back from the shores of death, as he would wait faithfully a thousand years. It frightened me sometimes that someone could love me that much.

Rain touched my face with a thousand cold fingers. My hair was already escaping from its braids, whipping my neck with icy tendrils: the strangers on the street would not meet my gaze. I think I was being invisible, though not by any particular effort of will.

Archaea lived, if that is the word, in an achingly artistic loft deep in the redlight district, hung with black silk tapestries and festooned with chips of crystal and blue Christmas lights, rife with illicit sex and controlled substances. At the last count she had fifteen television sets and two hot tubs stuffed somewhere within the apartment. By the time I got there, my heels were killing me and the rain had run all the way down inside the collar of my coat. I stood there at my sister's threshold, unbraiding my hair, feeling very old and very unoriginal. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I whirled, smacking them with wet-heavy tresses.

"Tamar?!"

"Jack." I wasn't sorry I had whipped him. He was Archaea's on-again, off-again lover, her bandmate and fellow junkie, who had wanted me badly before he got an eyeful of my sister. He was sweet, in a Sid Vicious sort of way. I threw out a hip and regarded him with eyes which I knew were inhumanly green. "What's shaking?"

"What are you doing here?" he asked, looking me up and down.

"I need to talk to Jall," I told him. "Is she in?"

"I would assume so, since I came to see her too," he said. "Is it gonna take long?"

"That depends," I said, and turned around and rang the doorbell.

"What," said Archaea's voice.

"Darling," I said. "I need to talk to you." Behind me, Jack struggled for position at the microphone.

"Babe!" he called over my shoulder. "I brought you some straight shit!"

"Jack? Is that you?"

"No, it's me," I told her. "Look, buzz me in, we'll have a concise and civil conversation, and then you can indulge your vices plural."

The intercom sighed bitterly. "You won't go away?"

"No."

I looked around Archaea's anteroom, now done in eggplant and copper, with what looked like a real kilim on the floor and incense burning in bronze vessels. It was exactly like her to keep us waiting, I thought, wringing my hair out on her ultra-expensive carpet in a small access of malice. Jack lit a clove cigarette off a scented candle, offered me one.

"So, Tamar," he said. "How have you been?"

"Fine, I suppose," I told him, dragging on the clove. "Pickings are slim these days. I had to waylay a homeless man last night, which typically I don't believe in."

"That's a bitch," Jack agreed, and trailed off as Archaea slithered in.

It wasn't exactly Princess Leia's dancing-girl costume, but that was the general impression. She wore a bikini cast in red gold, which I would just imagine pinched at the joints, and thigh-high boots in deep purple suede which matched the chiffon that flowed from a belt at her hips and the operalength gloves which graced her round and perfect arms. Her hair remained in the offcenter wedge cut, half of it chinlength and layered, the other half kneelength and unshaped, glossy red like maple trees in autumn. One perfectly pencilled eyebrow arched to see my draggled hair and my soaked coat.

I arched my back and wriggled out of the coat, exposing the Mrs. Peel catsuit I was wearing beneath it. "So good to see you again, my sister," I told her.

"I wish I could say the feeling was mutual," she said, lying through her pretty teeth. "Come in. Say what you have to say."

"All right," I began, and became aware of Jack hovering with his eyes on stalks. "Do you mind?"

"Oh. Uh. Sure, um, I'll be in the tv room," he said, and left, grudgingly.

"Archaea. Are you working with Heaven?"

"Oh, my," she said, and sat down on the edge of an Ottoman ottoman. "Where did that come from?"

"I have a bad feeling about all of this," I told her. "This balance deal. What do you know about it?"

"Nothing whatsoever," she told me. "I am as mystified as you, although better dressed. Where did you get that garment?"

"Nowhere you'd care to shop," I smiled. "I dreamed of you, you know."

"I'm touched," she said, licking her violet lips.

"I dreamed of you back in Susa, in the sun, with the wreath on your hair," I said, no longer to her. "You were wearing the violet gown embroidered with gold, the one Darius gave him, and he never liked it....and you stood there in the palace with the sun falling on your head and your hair was like flame and you looked at me, and you said, If I must needs live forever, so should my sister....."

"Is there a point to this?"

"No, I suppose not," I sighed. "Only, why did I dream? I don't dream of anything. It's unnatural."

"You are unnatural," she informed me. "You don't kill."

"I don't need to kill. You don't either." I looked at her hard. "Look, why now, why as all this happens? I need to know. What has passed between you and Heaven?"

"My dear and inappropriate sister," she drawled. "Heaven would have nothing to do with me."

Yes, I thought. But would you speak to heaven?

Sarah spoke without words to the doctor and the nurse as they entered Riley's room, and they tacitly accepted that she was not visible. As they watched, Riley sighed and opened his eyes, clear and free from fever for the first time in weeks.

"How do you feel, Inspector?" the doctor asked.

"Where am I?"

"Mercy Hospital."

"Oh. Oh God. The bust..."

"Hush," the nurse said, softly. "It's all right. Everything's been taken care of."

Riley raised himself on an elbow. "I'm late...."

"Hush," the nurse said again. "Mendoza was here. She said it's okay, don't worry, you're to rest. She said Senor Numez is in custody."

He lay back, exhaled. "How long have I been here?"

"A night. You're much improved," the doctor told him. "How do you feel?"

"As if people have been walking on me," he said, his eyes still closed. "Better."

"Marvellous," the doctor said busily, walking around Riley's bed and flipping switches. "I think you're out of the woods, Inspector, only we'll have to keep you here for observation for a few days. Do you have a headache?"

"Not so much anymore," he said. "I feel...very tired, and my chest hurts, but not so badly now."

"Fine, fine," the doctor ticked the symptoms off on the clipboard. "I'll have someone come and remove some more of your blood and do a workup. Try and get some sleep."

They breezed out again. Sarah slid back into visibility.

"I didn't dream you?"

"No," she assured him, "that was really me. I came when you called for me."

"Sarah," he said. "Sarah....Weren't you...in trouble, recently? Something about a child?"

"No longer," she told him. "I am financially secure, and my baby is out of the charity ward. I've been a bad, bad girl, but I'm very good now."

"Good," he said, closing his eyes. "Good. I was...worried. I didn't know what would happen to you."

"Without Tamar's help I'd still be on the street," Sarah said, not so much to Riley as simply to the world. "She was like God."

Riley simply lay there. There was no God, he thought to himself. There was no God, and no Devil, and the world was merely muddling through the universe by itself.

Because he had always been utterly pragmatic it was difficult for him to recognize what Tamar was; and because he could not recognize what she was, like the millions of other mortals she knew, he accepted her presence in the world as simply that of another mortal. No thoughts of supernatural aid had crossed his mind, still ringing with the absence of pain. He assumed Tamar's great and seemingly sourceless wealth had found a charitable outlet in the case of the reformed whore.

Sarah watched. She could see his thoughts, vaguely, as through dark glass. They did not trouble her, because she was already beginning to understand the instinct of the mortal mind to ignore that which it could not comprehend or believe in; a kind of selective blindness. She realized Riley would never really be able to understand what she had become, and it disturbed her; but she felt no great sense of longing for the pain-filled world of the mortals. She moved to the window. Behind the glass all of London turned over uneasily in the dark hours before dawn, and angels took to wing in St John's Wood and Blackfriars as somewhere a whitethroat began to sing.

Lucifer received the report from Ahriman and Mammon in good order, raised an impeccable eyebrow at the stains of chocolate ice cream on Mammon's once-snowy robe, and shot a glance of immeasurable gratitude to Ahriman. "Marvellous," he said busily, "I'm happy to hear all is going well. What's Dagon doing these days?"

"Lying on a couch and chainsmoking, mostly," Ahriman said. "Mammon, I'm sure the people in Infrastructure are laying about themselves for want of you. Thanks for coming, by the way." Mammon sketched a bow, and withdrew.

"Was he very awful?" Lucifer asked.

"Not very, considering. I can see why Infrastructure's not exactly thrilled to have him."

"Yes, well, it's probably the safest place for him..." The tiny form of a cell phone tweeped from the snowdrifts of paper on Lucifer's desk, and he dug it out and took the call. "Hello?"

"Lucifer?"

"Speaking," he said, playing with a gold Cross pen identical to Gabriel's, inscribed with the legend Employee of the Month.

"It's me," Lilith said. "Look, I found Millius and Nostradamus wandering around in Babylon and they said that all the invisible lines of force are fucked up, and they're wondering if it might have something to do with all the balance disturbance that's been going on lately."

"Is Millius there?" Lucifer asked, curling his hair around his finger and tipping his head on one side.

"My Lord?" Millius came on the line.

"What's this about leylines?"

"We found some amazing fluctuations in the pattern of the lines, my Lord," she said. "Some of them date back to the time they imprisoned your Lordship for a thousand years: others are more recent. We're wondering if there's anything you can think of that would explain the melange of metaphysical energy we're getting around Jerusalem...?"

"My dear Millius. That area's been the Holy City for many different religions and they've all fought for it multiple times: it's only natural there should be a lot of residual energy in the place. So many lives have been lost for Jerusalem that I'd be surprised if it wasn't swarming with metaphysical energy."

"My Lord," Millius said softly and urgently, "I would rather do this than simply wait for the world to end. Even if I can't find anything at least I'll be busy," and he heard her draw controlled breath. "I think I will go mad, if I don't do something."

He was silent for a long moment, and Ahriman raised an eyebrow in concern. At last he let go of the platinum ringlet and leaned back in his chair. "I understand," he told her. "I think I do, anyway. This has to do with Dream, doesn't it?"

"Doesn't everything?" she asked him bitterly. "I'm sorry, my Lord. This isn't your problem." He heard clicking, and Lilith came back on the line.

"What the hell did you tell her?"

"Nothing she didn't already know," he said, and he suddenly felt very, very old.

It was raining in Hell as he walked out on his great balcony. Down below in the sinners' prisons, the rain fizzled out long before it reached the parched souls; up where he stood, the rain fell slowly and sadly and gently, as if it had forgotten how to stop, and was weeping for a sorrow half-forgotten. It was autumn, and the treetrunks of Lucifer's private garden were dark and stooping with rain, the leaves brilliant and glistening orange, red, violet and yellow, the colors of molten silver; the air was sharp and crackling with sadness, the soft rain-breeze tossing brilliant leaves in the grey sky, darkening grey stone. He stood silently as the Lord of Dreams had stood, his robe whipping around him in the gathering wind, his hair dark and draggled, his lashes very long and dark and jeweled with rain. From another of the eight towers he heard music; soft, sweet, growing louder and more and more insistent, seeming to be a part of the rain. He remembered standing at the foot of Mozart's bed as he composed this last, wordlessly lovely piece; remembered watching as Salieri's cramped hand described the miraculous notes on paper, loving the irony: the man had just enough talent to know that Mozart was something quite, quite different, but not enough to create magic of his own. God, he remembered, had instilled in Salieri the desire and longing to compose, and denied him the talent: leaving him just enough to recognize the incarnation of God in another. He remembered thinking, and I am supposed to be the evil one?

Lacrimosa dies illa, qua resurget ex favilla, judicandus homo reus....

He needed a drink.

Millius left Nostradamus in the land of the rising sun, watching as a tortoise described circles in the dust, and returned through the Shifting Zones to where Morpheus's mutable palace had last been found.

The Fashion Thing met her at the door, took her coat. "Oooh," she exclaimed. "Armani?"

"Gucci," Millius corrected. "Look, um, the King...."

"He's waiting for you," she was told. "Go right in there, then take your first left, then a right, then a left, then a right, then a left, then a right, then a left, then a right, and a right, and a left, and..."

Millius waved a hand at the Fashion Thing, who subsided in a welter of Calvin Klein signature underwear, and slid through a small gap in dimensions to Morpheus's throne room.

The Shaper half-lay in his great obsidian throne, wearing black jeans, a large and amorphous black sweater, and black Cavalier boots with hematite spurs. His hair had become ankle-length since she last saw him, and she had to steel her breathing as she approached him. He looked so very young, except for his eyes.

"My lord," she said, bowing low. "I have been travelling through the times."

"And what have you found?" he said, looking down at her through those mirrorlike eyes. She could not meet his gaze.

"Not a whole hell of a lot," she said. "The ley-lines are a mess. Neither Nostradamus nor I were able to get any sense out of them. It appears that the entire world has been strafed by some kind of metaphysical eraser which has destroyed any correlation between events and the geometaphysical record of their happening."

"Millius," he said. "Would you....have a drink with me?"

She looked up then, looked up through the clouds of time past, and saw no derision, no mocking, on his face.

"My Lord honors me," she said, and was impressed with the steadiness of her own voice. He slid out of the obsidian throne and descended the steps to the floor of his audience chamber, produced a bottle and two glasses out of air.

"My Lord," she said, looking at her feet, "if I may ask, how are you feeling?"

"Better," he said. "I am....very tired, Millius, and I have been working hard to repair my realm. They tell me you have been instrumental in ending the drain on my powers."

"I..."

"I thank you," he said, and presented her with a tiny glass of something red and deep and heavy. His long raven's-feather hair slipped down his face like rain. The world dissolved around her in shivers of other people's words and butterfly wings, and she heard somewhere the rhythm of someone's heart beating, and realized it was her own.

They drank.

Dreams are countries in and of themselves. They are the places within ourselves in which we fear to tread, and the places to which we return time after time in search of that which was once perfect, and could be again. They are promises and they are stardust, drifting away on solar wind. Just as a man in the coldest reaches of space dreams of the Renaissance glory of Florence in the rain, a young hooker curled up on the streetcorner that is her home dreams of a man in black leather with soft, soft hands and the voice of God; a child dreams of blood dripping down the moon and an old, old dog dreams of seas made of skulls and milk; a woman tied to a bed in a small room dreams of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and a man who dances for a living dreams of driving a bus along highways that never end, under a sun that refuses to set. And in all these fragments, the Dream King rides like music on the wind, never there, never anywhere else.

He takes Millius's hand and leads her into another world, one where there is nothing but music; and further into the dream, until they uncover the dreamer, who is opening cabin trunks full of albatrosses in the hot wind of Paradise, and then time moves suddenly ahead as it does in dreams, and there is nothing but fluttering notes that turn into diamonds, dripping and rock-hard and refracting their image over and over again until they fall and splash into crystal liquid on the slate floor. He shows her Mont-st-Michel made entirely out of toothpicks which writhe and become grass snakes, and he shows her old men chasing tigers in red weather. She gasps as suddenly she recognizes Fantine's old, old dream of Tholomyes in the dewy light of dawn in the apple orchards; and she lets the reflective pain drift away again as she watches the descent of the woman into the realm of her beloved's sister, without sorrow, without regret. Morpheus watches the dreams pass like cloudshadows over the twin lakes of her eyes, and does not know what he hoped to achieve. He gives her worlds, but they were not his to give, and he does not understand the power of the gift alone.

Gabriel could not shake the image of the dracula from his mind. Again and again he demanded of himself if the draculae could really find remorse within their souls, having sacrificed so much of those souls for the power and the beauty and the eternal life. Heaven had returned to what was almost normal; the slugs and the geese and the cockroaches had been Lysoled into submission, the angels had returned to work, their jobs resumed. The music of the spheres filled the airless vault of deep heaven. He sat at his leathertopped desk and could not escape the cold voices in his head.

He buzzed Susie and asked her to bring him a cup of herbal caffeine-free infusion, his long fingers twisted around each other in order to keep still. He could not remember being this tormented since the great schism, when his former friend Michael had asked him to join the insurrection, and he had lost sleep over the decision. He found himself itching for a cigarette, and was shocked and disappointed in the weakness of his flesh. He had tried one once back when he was a very young angel, and hadn't liked it, but there was something about the simple act of smoking that appealed to all that was base in him.

He gave up, flicked open the superslim computer and searched for the thing that called itself Archaea. It had been a few days. He wasn't being obsessive.

Respondent Not Found, it told him.

There are very few situations in which an archangel, especially an archangel like Gabriel, loses its self-control. This was verging on such a situation, comparable with the time in which he had discovered that the caterers for the Great Millenial Banquet a thousand years before had all died of food poisoning and could not produce the stuffed peacock served on a bed of braised dormice which he had ordered. He stared at the computer, and realized that he was damaging the screen with the force of his gaze; twin smoking dots had appeared on the surface. He cursed and canceled the damage with a wave of his hand.

Getting up, he moved to the windows and drew aside the curtain; far, far below the ten spheres turned gently with the sound of the glass Armonica. He looked down into the worlds that hung like turning jewels in the duskiness of Infinity, and forced himself to breathe deeply. It would do Heaven no good, he told himself, for him to go down in person to Earth and seek out this Archaea. It was a side issue. His own business. In fact he shouldn't even be thinking about it on company time, so to speak. He sighed heavily. Something dreadful must be wrong with the universe, he thought suddenly. What could have possibly set all this off?

Mental fire doors closed on that thought. Mysterious ways, he told himself. Nothing's wrong with the universe, this is just those mysterious ways working. Don't question it. Don't question anything. It's all part of God's Great Plan.

But he couldn't get the dracula out of his mind.

Celestial spectators crowd round, watching. Something is about to happen, they see. Something important, something that has to do with space-time, something dangerous.

Archaea had accepted my presence with bad grace. She was sitting sumptuously on a divan covered in purple silk and smoking a clove cigarette in a long holder, regarding me with half-closed eyes. "As I said, heaven would have nothing at all to do with me."

"That's not really the point," I told her. "Heaven would have nothing to do with you, but there are ways of communicating without revealing who you are. I must know, Archaea. I will, eventually. You might as well tell me yourself."

"I disagree," she informed me. "Whether or not I have spoken with the angels is none of your business, quite frankly." I knew then that she had, but in what form and for what remained a mystery.

Just then Jack wandered in, half-clothed. "Hey, lover," he said distantly, and I looked at the pupils of his eyes: they were pinpoints. I could smell his blood, smell the drugs, the corruption of his living body. I wondered how long he had in the world.

"Jack, darling," she said, uncoiling like a snake. "Tamar here thinks I've been doing deals with Heaven."

Jack laughed; a snory, distant sound I didn't like at all. I got up. Maybe Ishtar could help, or one of the impartial agents. Archaea was clearly settled in for the night: even as I left the room the sounds of her physical pleasure followed me down the hall. She had always been precocious, I reflected. Even as a child of fourteen she had had lovers, men fascinated by her serene and doll-like beauty, her youth and perfection. She appeared now to be in her early twenties: only around the eyes, her violet vampire eyes that were so very powerful to males, could you see the evidence of the centuries she had experienced.

I walked out into the night again. It had stopped raining some time ago, which I was glad of, and I meandered along the moonlit embankment as the clocks struck two. It was early yet.

I enjoyed that night as I hadn't in a long while, although the weight of what Archaea might be planning was heavy on me. I drank indiscriminately from three men who followed me down a dark alley, and I was not gentle with them. It seemed a sort of release to chew their flesh, to impose pain on them as they had clearly intended to impose it on me; but I was afraid at the same time, for my last lingering shreds of humanity.

It was four before I made a move back towards my house. I walked back slowly through Camden Town, enjoying the last of the true night. It was silent between the pools of streetlight, silent and peaceful. Someone stood beneath a lamp not far away from me, wearing a black coat bleached to grey by the strong light.

"Harlach?"

"Tamar," he said, looking up. "I'd hoped I'd find you here."

"What brings you to London?"

"I need to talk to you." He was leaning against the pole of the lamp, I saw, and he looked like hell, which was a peculiarly apposite simile, I reflected.

"Come home with me," I told him, and put an arm around his shoulders. I felt the narrow bones of his back relax under my touch. "You look like you could use a drink."

"Tamar," he said. "Tamar, it's Millius. I don't like what I see in her eyes."

"Come home," I told him again. "Tell me."

I took Harlach into my parlor and plied him with expensive brandy. In the light his pallor struck me as unhealthy, even for a demon, and his eyes looked as if they knew too much. Alex had put the baby Mary to bed in a Louis Quinze drawer, wrapped in a silk dressing gown, and he was now sitting beside the fire listening impartially to what Harlach had to say. In the flickering light Alex's pale hair was made flame, his alabaster skin held a rosy glow almost lifelike in its warmth. I found it hard to concentrate on what Harlach had to say.

"I went to the Dales." Harlach regarded the bottom of his glass dully. "I went to the Dales and I asked the spirit I know who exists there to tell me what the storyteller's future held. I asked whether she would survive Morpheus, and all he's done to her, and continues to do."

Alex would have spoken, but I motioned him silent. Harlach's dark hair fell forward over his brow, and he pushed it away irritably. "I asked, but I didn't know if I could deal with the answer. The seer told me he couldn't see clearly. He said she was created flawed, as a kind of joke, an experiment, some sort of throwaway function of a whimsical God's imagination. He said her love for Morpheus has already condemned her soul. You know she gave it to him, when he was scattered, and would have died?"

"I know," I said gently.

"He said she is already destined for misery, has no chance to come out of this well and strong. And he said more. He said something about the meaning of forever changing. He said he couldn't see clearly, that there was a wall between him and the worlds. I don't know what that might mean."

For a long time I was silent, turning Harlach's words over in my head. The seers of the world were generally accurate unless one of the nonimpartial agents had got to them. The sense of destinies winding down that had preoccupied me all night was stronger now, stronger than ever.

"Harlach," I said. "You know, of course, that the celestial balance has been thrown off. My own sister is conspiring with Heaven; I don't know why or how, but she is, and I'm afraid."

"Archaea?" he said wearily. "You know what; that doesn't surprise me," and he drained his glass. "Archaea was always mercenary, always kept a foot in both camps, even in the times when those camps were pitched not a hundred yards from one another and there were arrows pointing from both sides all through the night. Tamar, where is all this going to end? It has to end. I...none of us...can take much more of this."

I said nothing. Alex glared at the fire, and it crackled in a very ill way, and guttered low. Dawn was not far off.

The three of us, two vampires and a demon, sat in the Regency white and gold of my drawing room and watched the end of the world approaching. It was a long way off yet, scarcely more than a dustcolumn on the horizon; but there were flashes of steel in the dustcloud, and the distant beat of hooves shuddered the ground.

Sarah watched through the night. As dawn began to touch the tops of the tallest buildings of the city, she rose, her fingers kissing Riley's cheekbone, and let into his mind the knowledge that she had been there and that she would return. She became mist, and slid between the edges of the slightly-opened window, and drifted out into the beginnings of the morning.

There was something very queer about being vaporous. She felt herself begin to lose control, felt the edges of herself sliding away, and quickly thought cohesive thoughts. Gently she let herself be blown on the very edge of a breeze back out towards the river, and Camden Town, and the world she had just entered that same night.

Riley had been well, when she had left. Exhausted, and still coming off the amphetamine crash, but well. She had been unwilling to leave, of course.

She wondered at herself. He had hunted her across London for some reason neither of them really understood; he had been her nemesis, the man she feared most, the man she wanted least to encounter in all the world. Yet he had called for her, and she had come, as if it was the most natural thing she had ever done, to his bedside; and she had brought him out of his fever, and she had held his hand as it cooled from a burning heat, and it had been her face he had wanted to see as he opened his eyes to a world cool and reasonable for the first time in days. Sarah did not entirely understand the surge of feeling beneath her breastbone at the thought of Riley lying ill in the high white bed. At twenty-three, she had never been in love.

She materialized at the foot of the steps to Tamar's house, let herself in with the key the vampires had given her. Flickering firelight drew her to the living room, and she found Tamar, Alexander and someone she didn't know sitting around the fire and looking almost inexpressibly exhausted.

Silently Sarah walked forward into the dim light of the room, her hair already rippling down her back with the night's growth, and took a seat facing the dark-haired stranger who for some reason reminded her of Riley. "What's going on," she asked softly.

"Where are my manners?" I asked the room absently. "Sarah, this is Harlach, a fallen angel and Duke of Hell; Harlach, meet Sarah, who has just recently joined the ranks of the undead."

Harlach looked up and met Sarah's eyes, and they exchanged a long slow glance. "How much do you know about Armageddon?" he asked.

"Rivers of blood," Sarah offered, "seas boiling, bottomless pits opening, the last great battle between Michael and Lucifer..? The four horsemen."

Harlach poured himself more brandy. "More or less. The world appears to be losing ground. The balance of power between Heaven and Hell has become unstable, and it appears that cosmic entropy is taking over."

"Wonderful," said Sarah. "Tamar, can we die?"

"Yes, actually," I said. "It takes some doing, but it's possible. And I do have some contacts in the underworld, as you see, so we'd have a reasonably easy time of it. But look, Harlach, how long do you think we have? And can this be reversed at all?"

"I just don't know," Harlach said. "We've already had a lurch in one direction, and one to counterbalance it; either we're yawing out of all control or this is balance coming back. But I don't think it's balance coming back. If the seer is blind, then we really don't know the state of the universe."

"Lilith hasn't been in touch?"

"Not lately. I think she's in Mesopotamia or something."

"I have a nasty feeling about all of this," Alexander said musingly. "If only we knew what was going on in Heaven."

"I think I might be able to help with that at least," Harlach said, more brightly. "Lucifer's got direct video feed from Heaven, but more importantly there were two captive angels there a few days ago. If we've still got them they could be of definite use."

"No kidding," I said. "Just threaten to force-feed them red meat, and they'll cave." Harlach made as if to get up, but I was quicker, and I went to him and took his hands and knelt by him. "Hush. Rest a while first. I can see through you."

Time passed, evenly, the way it does in novels; the world turned a little. Both Harlach and I realized there was little we could do before morning, and although Harlach was legitimately able to function in daylight far better than could I, he didn't much like it, and it tended to give him headaches, which he didn't need. There was an air of anticlimax in the Rococo room, and the wretched fire continued to burn unabated as one by one the vampires filed out of its flickering warmth, and slept in the darkness of a Camden Town dawn.

Harlach curled up on the large and overstuffed sofa, and went to what he considered sleep.

Lucifer was holding a conclave. He did this so seldom that no one could actually remember where the great Conclave Hall was in the myriad rooms and corridors of the Dis complex, so they ended up all sitting around the banqueting table in the lower section of the Paris Opera copy. Lucifer, although well aware of the illusionary nature of the structure, kept expecting to see Christine Daae and Erik wandering around in masquerade costume. He'd been spending too damn much time with Millius, he mused.

Asmodeus, Ozymandias, Ahriman, Mammon, Aidoneus, Baal, Dagon, Belial, Moloch and a bunch of other incarnations of the great office were sitting around the mahogany table. Lilith, dressed for the occasion in a remarkably modest and conservative pinstripe pantsuit, lounged in the chair to his left, and drank champagne directly from the bottle.

"I'm doing this out of a doomed hope that one of you might have any idea what's going on," Lucifer said, "or even what we might hope to do about it." He steepled his fingers and regarded the gathering of devils.

"We can feel something coming," Dagon said absently. "Our blood, cliched as it may seem, is beginning to boil. Although if all of this is because of some strange imbalance, it should fix its own damn self because of homeostasis, right? So there must be something more."

"It's Heaven," Mammon said with finality. "Of course it's Heaven. Not homeowhatsit or imbalances because those have never happened before. It's Heaven and those angels."

"Duly noted," Lucifer said dryly. "Anyone else?"

"Something's wrong with Time." The voice, quiet and somehow like a snake's voice might sound if it could speak, slid down the table from the shadowy distance where Asmodeus sat. Lucifer knew he affected the glowing red eyes and the sibilant voice because he thought he wasn't really a demon without them, but he couldn't deny its effectiveness.

"How do you know," he inquired.

"Can't you feel it? It's like when they tried to stall Time while they altered reality." Asmodeus, besides being vain, was good at choosing his words. Lucifer thought. Heaven had tried to mess with time back in the fourteenth century, which is why it had lasted so goddamn long; however, as he recalled, there had been some remarkably unpleasant side effects. He remembered the wretched off-balance swirling feeling of existence in the timeslip, and how relieved everyone had been, including the angels, when they had returned things to their normal balance. Yet, he wondered, was this any different? Only both of the sides had experienced the negative effects. 

If, as he was beginning to believe, this really was the end of days, it spoke of a larger power in control. Something far greater than either God or himself, greater than their respective and more or less identical concepts of good and evil. Something in control of them, as they considered themselves in control of the human world.

"Moros," said someone. Lucifer flicked a glance down the table, identified the speaker as Ozymandias, who was resolutely staring at the tabletop. 

"Moros?" he repeated. 

"The Greeks' god of destiny. Well, not even a god of destiny; destiny itself. The master of puppets. Greater, as they wrote, than the entire Olympian pantheon put together, and more secretive than the Eleusinian mysteries. Not necessarily him, but it's got to be something sort of similar. A controlling force."

"But why?" Mephistopheles asked rhetorically, downing a handful of aspirin.

"Well, exactly." Ozzy steepled his fingers, still not looking up. "As the humans keep on saying, God works in mysterious ways, and it sort of works for us too. Whatever this is is bigger than us, and we can't possibly hope to understand it. Harlach called me, by the way. He said that he contacted one of the seers, who apparently can no longer see. That sort of implies that something really permanent is about to happen."

"Fuck," said Lucifer elegantly. "I believe this calls for another flight into the thunders of the outer spheres. Maybe I can find out what's going on."

"You don't mean...?" Ozzy looked up, rather white.

"I do. All right, everyone, here's the deal. I want Hell locked down for a siege. No one gets in, no one gets out, without my knowing it. And all of you get to the central towers. That's the safest place in the spheres, if anything should happen. Mephistopheles, Ozymandias, Ahriman, you three are in command until I return, which shouldn't be very long. No one do anything stupid, okay? It's not time to panic yet."

"Will you tell us when it is?" Lilith stood up. "I'm going with you."

"No you're jolly not," he returned quietly. "I'll be perfectly safe, and in any case they need you here. Everyone knows you're the smartest individual in the place."

"You always did have to be a hero, didn't you," she spat. "Damn you."

"Already done, my love," he told her gently, and kissed her hand. "Already done."

The assembled Lords of Hell watched in variegated silence as Lucifer leapt into the air, great snowy wings unfurling silently from his shoulders, and remained utterly still until the form of their leader had disappeared into the brilliance of Hell's crystalline skies. 

Dawn drifted unpleasantly over the greasy streets of London, leaving the omnipresent fog lingering in alleyways and culs-de-sac all over the city, smelling of wet stone and age and darkness. Outside a tenement in the depths of the more unpleasant sector of Camden Town, a faint ringing threaded its way through the heavy air, sounding like a wet fingertip dragged along a wineglass rim, resounding with the crystal music of the spheres. A pale blue beam of light appeared from the low clouds, pouring a thin stream of luminescence down to the cobblestones. Slowly this light began to coalesce and solidify, until it held the shape of a figure.

Gabriel stepped out of the light, shivering unpleasantly in the wet air, and called clothes into being around himself. It was, he reasoned, perfectly understandable to descend into the mortal world and find the dracula. It was obviously God's Plan, since he hadn't been told not to, and he was really, really curious as to what she intended.

He climbed the steps to the apartment where she was sleeping, let himself in by the simple expedient of rematerializing inside the closed door, and found himself in a place the likes of which he had never seen before. Strange blue lights festooned the room, which was decorated with a heady mixture of salacious posters and ancient Turkish and Syrian artifacts. On the bed, if bed it could be called, lay the naked bodies of the dracula and her lover, who Gabriel could immediately tell was still human, and most definitely sinful. He felt sick. The dead eyes of the women on the posters stared at him; he saw, again, as he had seen so many hundred years before, the brilliance of the noonday sun glinting off the cup held high in the hands of the woman who sat astride the donkey, and the dead eyes with which she stared at the crowds....

The vampire rolled over and raised her head, staring at him with eyes that glowed in the dimness of the room. Nausea rose warm inside him. 

"What do you want?" she demanded. Her voice was low and rough, unpleasant.

"You spoke to me of redemption," choked Gabriel. "Of another of you who consorts with the Adversary."

"Who the fuck are you?" she demanded.

"I am Gabriel." He swallowed hard, trying to force down the sickness, aware it wouldn't be long before he lost that battle.

"Get out of my bedroom, you freak," she spat. "Do you realize what time it is?"

"Do you realize with whom you are speaking?" he returned, but ruined the dramatic effect by becoming violently sick. She disentangled herself from the human, spouting a stream of curses that would have made him blush, had he not already been in a compromising position, and propelled him, still vomiting, to a bathroom.

"Honestly," she said to him, some time later, "you could have bloody called me before showing up in what is to me the middle of the night and blithering about another of me that consorts with the Adversary. You angels are supposed to be polite, yeah?"

He gave her a look that was mostly apologetic, despite his continuing awareness that she was loathsomely evil and contaminating him with every moment they remained in the room together. He had to admit she had been fairly decent to him, after he had thrown up all over her irreplaceable carpet; she had even made him a cup of herbal tea, and compromised her evil nakedness by putting some clothes on. They were sitting at her kitchen table, he wrapped in a blanket and she wearing purple silk pajamas.

"It didn't occur to me," he admitted. "Tell me about this vampire you want to get rid of."

"She's evil," said Archaea, and lit a cigarette. "She consorts with the devil. And she's supporting a whore."

Gabriel thought about that briefly. What, after all, was Archaea?

"I know what you're probably thinking," she cut in. "Yes, I'm bad. But I honestly do want to reform. I'm ashamed of the way I've been, and I thought that maybe if I helped your lot get rid of another stain on humanity that my own stain might be reduced."

He looked at her. There was something almost compelling about her; those big eyes, fringed with great childlike black lashes....The image of the whore of Babylon faded from his mind, to be replaced with that of Dickens's Nancy, ragged and filthy and shining like a jewel in a bed of dross.

"Of course," Archaea murmured, "I understand if you don't want anything to do with me." She put out the cigarette and turned demurely to the stove, put on a kettle. "Excuse me. I've got to go and see if Jack is all right. I'll be right back."

Gabriel remained at the kitchen table, surrounded by warmth and light, wrapped in velvet softness, thinking of her eyes. Violet eyes. When had he last seen violet eyes?

"Sorry," said Archaea, coming back in. Gabriel looked up at her, met those purple eyes. "Look, are you really all right? You look awful."

"I'll be fine," he told her. "But I've got to know more about this vampire. Where does she live? What name does she use?"

Archaea refilled his cup. "She calls herself Tamar."

  
  



End file.
